Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
FAISAL DEVJI
ZAHEER KAZMI (Editors)
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Copyright © Faisal Devji, Zaheer Kazmi and the Contributors 2017
Acknowledgements vii
Contributors ix
List of Figures xi
ORIGINS
1. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Cage Hussein Omar 17
2. Corrupting Politics Nadia Bou Ali 47
3. Illiberal Islam Faisal Devji 65
DEBATES
4. Postcolonial Prophets: Islam in the Liberal Academy Neguin Yavari 91
5. A New Deal Between Mankind and its Gods Abdennour Bidar 105
6. The Dissonant Politics of Religion, Circulation, and Civility in the
Sociology of Islam Armando Salvatore 125
7. Islamic Democracy by Numbers Zaheer Kazmi 149
THE STATE
8. Bourgeois Islam and Muslims without Mosques Carool Kersten 167
9. Islamic Secularism and the Question of Freedom
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam 189
10. Militancy, Monarchy and the Struggle to Desacralise Kingship in
Arabia Ahmed Dailami 203
v
CONTENTS
RESISTANCE
12. Preliminary Thoughts on Art and Society Sadia Abbas 243
13. The Political Meanings of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam
Edward E. Curtis IV 263
Notes 299
Index 345
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has its origins in the ‘Beyond Muslim Liberalism’ workshop held at
St Antony’s College, Oxford in March 2014. In addition to our chapter writ-
ers, we would like to thank the following workshop participants who gave
papers not included in this volume, or acted as discussants and session chairs:
Madawi Al-Rasheed, Mohammed Bamyeh, Alastair Crooke, Michael Freeden,
Kevin Fogg, and Nilufer Gole. The workshop was supported by the Economic
and Social Research Council (ES/J003115/1) and hosted by the Asian
Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford.
Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi
vii
CONTRIBUTORS
ix
CONTRIBUTORS
x
CONTRIBUTORS LIST OF FIGURES
xi
INTRODUCTION
The relationship between Islam and liberalism has been a subject of scholarly
as much as popular debate for at least a century and a half. Its progress some-
times hailed and at other times found wanting, this relationship has been
marked by the unchanging and even stereotypical terms in which it has been
debated, including issues such as the separation of church and state, the status
of women and the rights of non-Muslims. Each of these issues serves as a lit-
mus test to measure the liberalism of Muslim individuals as well as societies,
and each is also drawn from the real or imagined history of liberalism in
Europe. However, as a historical and variable phenomenon, liberalism does
not in fact possess a normative definition but constitutes a family of shifting
and overlapping ideas having to do with the freedoms of property and con-
tract, speech and movement, or of rights and representation.
The freedoms that have come to define liberalism differ in time and place,
so that among its Muslim supporters as much as enemies, for instance, private
property and contract law have rarely been controversial (though they might
be for those Muslims who identify as socialists). Moreover, the categories
‘Islam’ and ‘liberalism’ are not in fact so distinct from one another, and it is
even possible to argue that proponents of the latter have always relied upon
1
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
2
INTRODUCTION
one of history, conceived as a number of stages that all peoples had to traverse,
but in whose path some were more advanced than others.6 And so it took
Asian or African intellectuals to criticise the racist and civilisational distinc-
tions of Western liberalism and insist upon the universality of its freedoms.
In some very real sense, then, liberalism was given its historical potential
and indeed reality by colonised populations, and its freedoms were therefore
only made into universal ones with the dismantling of Europe’s empires after
the Second World War and the enshrining of development and modernisation
theory as supposedly global and inclusive ideals. Even when international
institutions such as the United Nations were established during this period,
they had to be forced by the former colonies grudgingly admitted as members
to adopt liberal ideals and principles for all.7 And yet the relationship between
Islam and liberalism has always been spoken about with reference to some
founding European event only distantly connected to such modern ideas of
freedom, like the Renaissance, Reformation or Enlightenment, that Asian or
African societies were meant to replicate in order to achieve both their moder-
nity and their liberty.
In other words, a number of distinct and sometimes disconnected historical
narratives, ranging from the recovery of Greco-Roman philosophy, the emer-
gence of Protestantism or the dominance of reason have gone into conceptu-
alising the relationship between liberalism and Islam. When Muslims referred
to these founding events, they did so in their own ways, and not necessarily in
order to remain faithful to some European original.8 Indeed, it is the political
ambiguity of such references that is striking, with a single issue capable of
holding diametrically opposed meanings. One way in which non-Europeans
laid claim to these founding events, for example, was to argue, with varying
degrees of historical accuracy, that they were only made possible due to the
influence of (in this case) Islam’s scientific and philosophical tradition—itself
the inheritance of European antiquity.
Whereas Muslim reformers of the nineteenth century, such as the cele-
brated Indian leader Syed Ahmed Khan, used this argument to urge upon
their coreligionists a friendly attitude towards Europe’s liberalism, others in
the following century saw this history as one of theft and malice. Having sup-
posedly relied upon Islamic learning to achieve its dominance, then, Europe
was understood as having gone on to subordinate Muslim societies, depriving
them of the opportunity to develop their own legacy of learning. This story
was repeated by the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in an online inter-
view in 2008.9 And what is interesting is the fact that both his anti-Western
3
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
account, and the pro-Western one from which he drew it, presumed a relation-
ship between Islam and European liberalism so intimate that Muslims had to
recover their true selves from it—which is how Zawahiri, like Syed Ahmed a
century before, justified al-Qaeda’s reliance on Western technology. Naturally,
what these two men understood by terms like Islam, liberalism or the West
differed, but it is the narrative of intimacy they shared that is fascinating in its
very ambiguity, showing how difficult it is to distinguish liberal or pro-West-
ern accounts from their opposites.
In the nineteenth century, when liberalism crystallised as an ideology,
albeit a multifarious one, and almost simultaneously came to the notice of
non-European thinkers, such economic, social or political reality as it pos-
sessed in their lands was to be found largely in colonial contexts. Indeed, in
some ways the colony represented liberalism’s ideal, its state being legitimised
as neutral and disinterested precisely because it was run by an alien power.
And this state’s frequently glorified character as a third party also turned colo-
nised subjects into interests, whose internecine quarrels could only be arbi-
trated by it in a kind of social contract, one that allowed them to assume
political universality by identifying with the government.10 Whether or not
such a state recognised some element of political representation, in other
words, it was able to instantiate, better than any democracy, many of the clas-
sical traits of a liberal order. These included government neutrality, subjects
defined by their differing interests, and the contract that brought them all
together in a pragmatic rather than natural or indeed national way. And the
recognition by colonised intellectuals of this connection meant that while
anti-imperialist figures like Jawaharlal Nehru sought to fulfil the liberal prom-
ise he thought characterised Britain’s mission in India, others like
M.K. Gandhi saw liberalism as itself part of a system of colonial oppression.
Precisely because they were colonial subjects, however, and thus deprived
not only of political responsibility but also forbidden to use its terms, nine-
teenth-century Muslims under British, French or Dutch rule were compelled
to think about liberalism in cultural or religious terms. Indeed, by minimising
if not eliminating pre-colonial forms of profane or monarchical authority, and
excluding the use of political language, to say nothing of political demands
among its subjects, the colonial state ended up expanding the role played by
Islam in the societies it ruled. But even the few independent Muslim powers,
like the Ottoman Empire, seem to have encouraged the making of liberal
claims in the name of Islam once they became self-consciously modern or
Europeanised—with the state-sponsored pan-Islamism of the Sublime Porte,
4
INTRODUCTION
for example, understood as a project of Muslim unity and equality in the face
of rival claims to Christian as much as Muslim loyalties by European empires.
Such independent countries as Turkey and Iran also appropriated liberal
forms of politics during their respective constitutional reforms and revolu-
tions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although these struggles
to delimit executive power or guarantee citizenship rights did not necessarily
entail European-style secularism. Indeed, these constitutional movements
have arguably informed ‘religious’ parties more than ‘secular’ ones in both
countries.11 Whatever this tells us about the more general relationship
between religion and liberalism, in much of the Muslim world it implied the
largely theoretical and in fact exegetical adoption of liberal ideals among
Muslims, with great debates occurring over ostensibly irrelevant issues like the
status of women or slavery in the Qur’an, jihad as a purely defensive war
hedged by various rules, the republican form taken by the early Caliphate, and
so on.
For a variety of reasons, then, liberalism became a subject of cultural and
religious, rather than political debate among a number of colonised Muslim
intellectuals. It might even be the case that these men discussed liberal values
more intensely than their Christian peers in Europe and America, not least
because Islam—like Catholicism in earlier times—was often seen as posing a
kind of obstruction to modern forms of polity. Today, we seem to have
returned to this situation, except now the cultural-religious focus of liberal
debate has the postcolonial development of Islamic states and forms of mili-
tancy as its context—to say nothing about the ‘War on Terror’.12 But it is also
possible to argue that this mode of thinking about the possibility, or failure,
of liberalism in the Muslim world results from the fact that its values have
never, since colonial times, possessed a political dimension but only ever a
cultural-religious one. In other words, while Islam has been shot through with
liberal ideas for nearly two centuries, the frequently ‘secular’ and authoritarian
states in which it exists have not always been so, which of course makes the
‘cultural’ debate about Muslim liberalism a largely misplaced one.13
Despite all the ink spilt on describing Islam’s ‘political’ character, not least
by Muslims themselves, it is striking how lacking in politics its modern mani-
festations can be. Take Islamism, for instance, the most important form of
political religion in our time. Of its three great founding figures, only
Ayatollah Khomeini was able to establish a polity in the name of Islam,
though he did so by subordinating the sacred law to the sovereign will of Iran’s
revolutionary leader, who was able to reinterpret and even supersede it for
5
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
6
INTRODUCTION
7
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
8
INTRODUCTION
long history and constrained by the crude limitations of its present role in
defeating terrorism. In this regard, the present volume also seeks to address the
limits of Muslim liberalism as a variegated discourse and practice that has
become identified with the perceived need for Muslims to tamp down on vio-
lence in the name of their religion. This has created a binary of ‘Muslim liberal-
ism versus Muslim militancy’ where the construct of Muslim liberalism is
inextricably tied to the security and stability of Western liberal democracies.
The intellectual hegemony of liberal Islam has also placed limits on any
alternative, even nonviolent vision of Islamic thought and practice that chal-
lenges the liberal state. This has been in no small measure a consequence of the
state’s role in the construction of ‘moderate’ Islam and the immense govern-
mental resources ploughed into the counter-extremism agenda, which has
helped commodify it. This has also bolstered institutional orthodoxies that
have little room for the free expression of ‘heretical’ religious tropes and
impulses. In this way, rather than expanding the sphere of Muslim liberty,
Muslim liberalism can act as a disciplining force, buttressing religious ortho-
doxy together with the authority of the state.
Islam’s subordination to the political exigencies of the liberal state has had
a peculiar influence on the historically non-political, or cultural-religious,
implications of a belief in the pre-eminence of God’s sovereignty. In the bifur-
cated political geography of global Islam today—where Muslims make claims
on states in both majoritarian and minority contexts—we see a similar pro-
gression towards the assimilation of liberal democratic forms governing the
language of political possibilities, from the evolution of the Muslim
Brotherhood in the Middle East to the confessional claims of Muslim minori-
ties in the West. It is in this sense that the disagreements reformist-minded
Muslims—Islamist or otherwise—may have with liberalism belie the philo-
sophical ground they share with it. For, even as they seek to synthesise, adapt
to, or critique Western liberalism, they cannot exit its language and categories.
In this way, Muslim liberals have accepted the institutional parameters of the
West’s liberal modernity (the state, rule of law, representative democracy,
human rights) even as they seek to contest them.
Whatever their differences, Muslim liberals tend to regard state authority
as a critical guarantor of a free society, and conceive Islam as being congruent
with the values of secular liberal democracy. They also see Islamic religious
authority, grounded in some institutional form, as being elemental to a virtu-
ous Muslim society. The result has been that reformist trends in Islam today
have become predicated largely on their correspondence with the political
theory and practices of Western liberal democracies. This is the benchmark
9
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
10
INTRODUCTION
themselves parasitic on Western critiques of it? And how have Muslim liberals
attempted to co-opt non-violent but more radical forms of critique that ques-
tion liberalism’s premises? Forms of liberalism that trace their origins to the
‘Enlightenment’ have long been a focus of internal criticism in the West,
focusing in particular on the hegemonic tendencies inherent in liberal concep-
tions of progress, reason, rationality and impartiality. Muslim critics situated
within ‘postcolonial’, ‘post-left’ and ‘critical’ responses to liberalism draw on
these Western traditions of critique.23 In this way, it could be said that even in
contesting liberalism’s influence on Islam, intellectual possibilities for the
Muslim world are still being read through a Western optic.
This intellectually parasitic relationship leads to alternative forms of
Western intellectual hegemony, which have arisen largely as a by-product of
the long-standing Euro-American critical engagement with liberalism and
adapted to Muslim contexts. Thus, as if in direct dialogue with Andrew
March’s synthesis of Rawls and Islam, Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible State draws
on the correspondence between critical theorists and Islam.24 This has also
been evident in the adoption of Western anarchist and counter-cultural
modes of critique by Muslims.25 The difficulty in exiting Western liberalism,
even when criticising it, points to underlying questions about Islamic authen-
ticity that have reasserted themselves in the public sphere with force in recent
years, and to which we now turn.
11
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Islamic authority, have been complicit in aiding and abetting the growth of
this surveillance state. The debate over ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ Islam is thus
fundamentally about ownership, not only of ‘true’ Islam but over the very
meaning of freedom. In this regard, conceptions of Muslim liberty and their
multiple possibilities can be paradoxically constrained by the advocacy of
liberals. To some extent, this far-reaching liberal narrative—which has come
to determine Muslim ‘authenticity’ in the public sphere—has had the added
effect of relegating much non-violent protest to the realm of aesthetics rather
than politics.27
12
INTRODUCTION
13
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
socio-political and historical contexts. The final part of the book, ‘Resistance’,
ends with a focus on the place of liberalism, its contestation and re-workings
in Muslim counter-narratives to the liberal state, which also depart from con-
ventional or orthodox narratives of Muslim resistance. From the politics of
race and nation in the Nation of Islam, to art and aesthetic production as a
form of protest in Pakistan, to the neoliberalism of ‘Post-Islamism’, these final
chapters illustrate the variety of creative and critical engagements between
Islam and liberalism that are covered in this volume.
14
ORIGINS
1
Hussein Omar
No scholarly work looms larger over the history of Muslim liberalism than
Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1962).1 Following
Hourani, historians and lay commentators alike have located the origins and
essence of ‘Muslim liberalism’ in the thought of the ascendant Egyptian bour-
geoisie of the late nineteenth century. In particular, they focused on the ideas
of the former mufti Muhammad ʿAbduh and his disciples, including the lawyer
Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and the man Hourani celebrated as ‘Egypt’s first femi-
nist’, Qasim Amin. Even as assessments of the movement’s merits or lack
thereof have varied in the past six decades, scholars remain captive to Hourani’s
terms of analysis. While the historiography has imposed an ideal, archetypal
liberalism on to these figures, shaping them into avatars of ‘liberal Islam’, this
categorisation, as I will show, was predicated on a highly selective reading of
their writing in isolation from their actions, obscuring the complexities of, and
the contradictions within, their thought. And though some have issued empiri-
cal correctives to his work, Hourani’s conception of liberalism itself remains
unchallenged and the investments that shaped his canon have not yet been
examined. As the story that Hourani told has become ever more entrenched,
17
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
few have questioned the ideas, individuals and institutions it has come to
eclipse. Hourani’s text itself played a role in obscuring, as the introduction to
this volume suggests, the more eclectic and heterodox aspects of nineteenth-
century Muslim thought, as we shall see, which have sometimes been treated as
inchoate or debased versions of more immaculate contributions.
Hourani has been rightly celebrated for overturning the ‘patronizing, mor-
alistic and essentialist Orientalist tradition of judging texts and their produc-
ers according to the most stringent criteria of Western “humanism” and
“liberalism”’, which, in Israel Gershoni’s words, is ‘an ahistorical, ideal-type
kind of test that very few intellectuals in the West would have successfully
passed’.2 However, as unmoralising and unessentialist as Hourani’s account
was, it proposed an alternative ideal-type—where words were divorced from
action, the sophisticated was favoured over the vernacular, and the complete
and speculative was considered to the exclusion of the fragmentary and the
practical—that now bears the weight of orthodoxy. Hourani’s attempt to distil
constitutive elements for liberal theory required him to guard the boundaries
between political ideas (abstract, normative and lofty) and political practice
(mundane, consequentialist, tactical). He considered the former worthy of
study while dismissing the latter as belonging to the narrative history of
events. This distinction between ideas and events is reflected in the types of
sources Hourani used, favouring formal and abstract treatises over the frag-
mentary ideas embedded in newspaper articles, speeches, debates, diary entries
and letters. It is precisely to the latter type of source that I will turn in order to
complicate our picture of ‘Muslim liberal’ thought.
Aside from the fact that a normative split between political theory and
political practice is patently Eurocentric—as it is a distinction virtually non-
existent in the Egyptian context—it has also created certain optical illusions.
These include the assumption that political theory determines political prac-
tice, and not vice versa, which has led historians to overstate the importance
and influence of a few ‘great men’. Because Amin, for example, wrote in the
recognisable and Eurocentric form of the treatise, which intellectual historians
typically study, Hourani designated him the ‘first feminist’. But Amin’s ideas
were not particularly novel, even if the genre he chose for them was; others
had expressed similar ideas in various media for at least a decade before.3 Such
assumptions about theory and practice, I argue, have led historians to locate
the essence of Muslim liberalism within the thought of the small, self-con-
tained group of ‘isolated men’ known as ʿAbduh’s circle, bearers of a ‘moder-
ate’ Islam.
18
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
It was the British proconsul in Egypt, Lord Cromer, who first referred to
an ʿAbduh ‘school of thought’.4 Cromer considered his ‘friend’ the shaykh to
be an ‘enlightened’ religious scholar, ‘animated with liberal sentiments’, and his
students to be no less than the ‘Girondists of the Egyptian national move-
ment.’5 The proconsul expressed hope that the group would form an ‘indige-
nous’ bulwark against the ascendant double danger of fanatical pan-Islamism
and Anglophobia.6 As he was against direct colonial interference in matters
of religion, Cromer argued that cultivating the ‘moderate’ (liberal, elitist and
Girondist) Islam that ʿAbduh represented was the only means by which the
‘fanatical’ (violent, populist and Jacobin) could be defeated, as I will examine
in the first section of this chapter. Indeed, by the late summer of 1907, mem-
bers of ʿAbduh’s circle including Lutfi al-Sayyid had established a political
party that they called Hizb al-Umma. It stood in opposition to the group of
nationalists whom Cromer and other British observers alleged to be ‘fanatical’.
This latter group, which soon formed its own political party al-Hizb al-
Watani, was presided over by the charismatic lawyer–editor Mustafa Kamil
until his untimely death in 1908. Its ideas were further shaped by the writings
of the socialist Shaykh ‘Abd al-’Aziz Jawish. For historians, the two groups
have come to represent two irreconcilable ‘schools’ of nationalism and are
seldom examined as part of a single intellectual tradition.7 While Hizb al-
Umma was ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’, al-Watani was ‘fanatical’; the leadership of
Hizb al-Umma was enlightened, but that of al-Watani was ‘violent’. Hizb al-
Umma was secularising and progressively ‘Egyptianist’, while al-Watani was
religiously inspired and regressively Ottomanist or pan-Islamic.
While Hourani lauded the liberal thought of Hizb al-Umma, revisionist
historians have been less positive in their assessments. Scholars such as Leila
Ahmed have seen in al-Hizb al-Watani a radical, authentically Muslim alterna-
tive to the ‘derivative’ and Western ideas of Hizb al-Umma.8 Such scholars
have linked the espousal of liberal ideas among intellectuals with socioeco-
nomic and pecuniary ambition.9 Having been enriched by British agricultural
reforms, the bourgeois ʿAbduh group had an interest in prolonging the occu-
pation, which they did by promoting theories about Egypt’s backwardness and
arguing for the necessity of British tutelage until the country was ready for
self-rule.10 Scholars such as Walid Kazziha have further criticised these lackeys
of liberalism for their elitism and their hopeless infatuation with the West.11
In mimicking the European middle classes, Egyptian liberals asserted civilisa-
tional superiority over their social inferiors, while instrumentally advancing
their careers. In doing so, they recycled and propagated orientalist representa-
tions of their people as backward.
19
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Liberal reform, some scholars have argued, was no more than a cover for an
anti-political, colonially sponsored ‘official Islam’ that denigrated and sup-
pressed the mystical, ‘traditional’ faith of the subaltern population. The co-
opted middle classes were the colonial state’s native agents; they domesticated
religion, disciplined bodies and reduced Egyptians into self-interested,
monadic individuals.12 Other scholars, such as Abdeslam Maghraoui, have
objected that the norms ‘liberals’ propagated, despite their universalistic pre-
tensions, were abstracted from a particular, parochial moment in Western
European history and were therefore ill-suited to Egypt’s ‘culture’.13 Ignoring
the contingencies that generated those norms, bourgeois intellectuals
attempted to impose them upon their own society, which they had come to
regard as inferior and deficient. When their lower-class compatriots were not
receptive, they disseminated their ideas by violent and necessarily ‘anti-demo-
cratic’ means, chastening their stubborn countrymen into docility.
Whether celebrating or condemning the figureheads of ‘Muslim liberal-
ism’, historians have frequently advanced certain problematic assumptions.
Sometimes they use ‘liberal’ as a euphemism for ‘Western’. Often, scholars
treat liberalism as a coherent and clearly delineated ideology with a set of
essential traits, even if they disagree on what these are.14 To capture its
essence, which existed before ‘its own self-conscious formulation’, they cre-
ated intellectual genealogies that retrospectively identified theoreticians as
‘liberal’—without asking whether these men themselves would have recog-
nised such accounts.15
What made the ʿAbduh circle, in Cromer’s words, a ‘school of thought’, and
how precisely its ideas were different from those of its rivals, are questions that
historians have failed to consider. Being a disciple of the mufti was no predic-
tor of an individual’s political proclivities, as we will see in the second section
of this chapter in the gender debates provoked in 1899 by Qasim Amin.
Attributing to these debates the paradigmatic essence of the liberal Muslim
position retroactively, and to some extent arbitrarily, imposes lines of intel-
lectual ascent and descent on people who actively denied such lineages.16 It
claims for historians a better understanding of the ideology they describe than
‘those who played a fundamental role in its propagation’.17 The notion that an
‘ʿAbduh school’ had a monopoly over such arguments, and produced them by
coherent speculation, obscures the fact that these ideas were becoming hegem-
onic among political actors of all classes, be they ʿAbduh’s friends or his ene-
mies, landed aristocrats or ambitious lawyers, self-ascribed ‘moderates’ or
‘extremists’. If one is to overcome the ‘great man’ model of intellectual history,
20
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
21
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
was already being intuited or posited by Egyptian political actors.20 Far from
recycling the ideas they sought to overturn, intellectuals responded to and
refuted the powerful colonial representations of the ‘subject races’—allegedly
fanatical, self-interested, greedy—of which Egyptians were considered the
prime example. As these representations were crucial to imperial governance,
anticolonial thinkers recognised the need to engage in a subtle process of
subverting them: appropriating the words of colonial elites, overturning their
logics and investing their pronouncements with novel meanings. By doing so,
anticolonial activists tirelessly set out to topple the racial hierarchies that cast
long and dark shadows over their lives.
Such activists understood that there could be no repudiation of the hegem-
onic imperial project without a rethinking of the basic metaphysics of human-
ity upon which it had been erected. Their contemplative passages on the
Qurʾan and human nature were not just the facile, spiritual musings of oriental
mystics, but rather essential to the process by which they began to imagine
novel political alternatives to those of imperial hegemons. As I will discuss in
the final section of the chapter, through the rewriting of apologetic and sacred
history, they imagined a new de-essentialised subject. In this way, Egyptian
intellectuals articulated many of the key insights of a postcolonial critique of
Eurocentric modernity over half a century before these ideas appeared in the
academic field of postcolonial theory.
The notion that topical debates, such as those surrounding women’s rights,
could capture the essences of duelling visions of Islam—whether liberal, mod-
ernist and moderate, or radical, conservative and fanatical—has its origins in
the colonial archive itself. Muslim ‘moderation’ and ‘fanaticism’ were polemi-
cal labels that were first used by British officials to identify their friends and
enemies, and were later adopted by Egyptians themselves.21 In order to under-
stand their limitations as characterisations of the political debate, one must
turn to the contentious moment that produced them.
The representation of Muslims as fanatical was foundational to the British
project in Egypt. According to imperial officials, it was ‘fanaticism’ that
prompted the 1882 British bombardment of Alexandria and the seventy-year
occupation that followed. Had Britain been defeated in Egypt, ‘the lives of
Christians in all Mussulman states would have been in danger’.22 According to
Cromer, ʿUrabi, the leader of the revolutionary movement, was a religious
22
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
extremist and unconscious Jacobin who had aroused ‘race hatred and fanati-
cism’: as non-Muslims were murdered or fled the country, ʿUrabi proposed
that their property be confiscated and redistributed.23 By contrast, the British
state would act as a purely administrative ‘machine’: neutral, disinterested and,
as such, solely capable of guaranteeing the safety and property of all Egypt’s
subjects.24 By arbitrating fairly between the interests of the country’s various
socio-religious groups, Britain insisted that when its mission had been fully
realised, Egypt’s inhabitants would finally come to see that there had been no
true conflict between them and their colonial overlords.
From the 1890s onwards, fanaticism was the chief mode through which
Egyptian resistance to British reform—supposedly technocratic and apoliti-
cal—was interpreted. Cromer believed that the mass of Egypt’s population
were naught but political ‘ciphers’, ‘too apathetic, too ignorant and too little
accustomed to take their initiative to give utterance in any politically audible
form to their opinions even when they have any’.25 ‘Islamism of the past and
of the present’ had created an amoral society built on ‘unalloyed self-interest’.26
Because they understood nothing but economistic self-interest—and as such
were fundamentally apolitical—the peasants could be won over by the British
through greater prosperity. Having suffered abuse at the flail of morally and
financially bankrupt despots, the peasants would embrace British administra-
tive reform as they realised it perfectly aligned with their own needs.27 When
it did not work out as planned, opposition to the reform programme was
explained away as the product of irrational fanaticism or the self-interested
malice of the middle classes. If fanaticism was the prism through which differ-
ence with, and opposition to, their rational economistic project was under-
stood, ‘moderation’ became the term by which the British identified those
who were quiescent to it. Lutfi al-Sayyid would write that the allegation of
fanaticism was ‘a political principle’, equivalent to Britain’s ‘doctrine of free
trade’.28 The British invoked fanaticism to justify inhibiting the introduction
of parliamentary institutions in the summer of 1906 and refusing to decrease
the number of British troops in Egypt in April 1908, as well as to manipulate
shareholder confidence in the Egyptian market after the crisis of 1907.29
It was in 1907, with the establishment of political parties, that ‘moderacy’
and ‘fanaticism’ entered the lexicon of Egyptian politics. Among the first to
be established was Wahid Bey’s Egyptian Liberal Party (Hizb al-Ahrar), which
celebrated Cromer as the first just and merciful ruler ‘since the days of Omar
and Saladin’.30 In its view, Cromer was a father to Egyptians who had ‘given
them personal and religious liberty, and [instilled] in the hearts of all liberal-
23
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
24
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
conceptualise the differences that sometimes made the two parties into bitter
rivals? This is no easy task, for even those most intimately acquainted with
them found it difficult to articulate their disagreements; indeed, days after
Hizb al-Umma announced its programme, accusations flew in the Watani
newspapers that they themselves had advocated the same programme all
along.38 Despite his party’s reputation for harbouring revolutionary intentions
and pan-Islamic proclivities, Kamil was as unequivocal as his ‘moderate’ rivals
in his rejection of both. He considered revolution to be illegitimate even if
directed at legitimate ends; the 1882 uprising was treasonous, although it had
risen in defence of Ottoman sovereignty.39 Accusations that his party hoped
to spark a revolution were merely enemy propaganda.40 Kamil’s view was strik-
ingly similar to that of his adversaries. In the newspaper al-Garida, his rival
Lutfi al-Sayyid explained that he did not reject revolution on theoretical but
on pragmatic grounds. The failed Russian and Persian uprisings taught that
revolution should be avoided, for its likely failure would merely result in more
oppression and enslavement, setting back Egypt from its goals.41 Kamil
claimed that along with being labelled ‘revolutionary’, his party had been slan-
dered with accusations of espousing pan-Islamism.42 Yet ‘[driving] out the
English in order to surrender our country to Turkey as a simple Turkish prov-
ince’ was anathema to him. The notion that the Egyptian people ‘merely
wish[ed] to change masters and not to win independence’ was an insult.43 No
educated Egyptian would espouse ‘replac[ing] one yoke by another’, for this
would hinder the development of ‘a national consciousness’ and condemn the
Egyptian people to further slavery.44
Al-Hizb al-Watani continued to espouse nonviolence after Kamil’s death.
Shaykh ʿAbd al-’Aziz Jawish, who became the party’s chief ideologue and edi-
tor of its newspaper, al-Liwaʾ, has been considered—by colonial officials and
historians alike—the personification of the ‘violent’, ‘religiously fanatical’
politics of the Watanists. Yet this ‘extremist’ would maintain his predecessor’s
line on nonviolence, even if he had a voyeuristic fascination with assassina-
tions, armed struggles and revolutions elsewhere, such as the Committee of
Union and Progress (CUP)’s takeover in Turkey and the assassination of
Curzon Wyllie in India. Watching them from afar, Jawish judiciously avoided
incitement to such anti-imperial action at home, even if the British constantly
accused him of doing so. Jawish, despite being characterised by Hourani as a
‘violent orator’, argued for ‘Peaceful War’.45 For Jawish, recent global action—
such as the Swadeshi movement, or the Chinese boycott of American
goods46—demonstrated that Egyptians could still attain ‘all that they desire
25
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
by peaceful means, without requiring the destruction of lives and the tainting
of the earth with human blood’.47
If not through an appeal to moderation or violence, revolutionary inten-
tions or pan-Islamist proclivities, how then can we conceptualise the differ-
ences between the two parties? The picture is complicated by the mistaken
notion that Hizb al-Umma was merely a formalisation of the school of
thought espoused by ʿAbduh’s disciples. That ʿAbduh’s circle had previously
described themselves as ‘Hizb al-Imam’ (Party of the Imam), morphologically
similar to umma, adds to the confusion. As much as it might have given Hizb
al-Umma legitimacy for it to seem identical to, or descended from, the imam’s
‘school’, such a claim had little basis in reality. On a purely empirical level, a
tight connection between the ‘ʿAbduh school’ and their political affiliations
is difficult to establish. For instance, some of the individuals most strongly
opposed to the anti-veiling position would become members of the ‘liberal’
Hizb al-Umma, and some critics of the veil would join al-Hizb al-Watani.
Talaat Harb, Amin’s most fervent ‘Islamist’ critic, did not join the allegedly
religiously inspired al-Hizb al-Watani Party, but instead became a member of
Hizb al-Umma and a columnist for its newspaper. By contrast, Jawish, also an
ʿAbduh disciple, did not join the political party purported to represent
ʿAbduh’s ideas but its rival, al-Hizb al-Watani.
The notion that Hizb al-Umma was the political expression of the ʿAbduh
school is a powerful myth. Even those figures whom historians have assumed
to be the chief ideologues of Hizb al-Umma, such as Qasim Amin and Ahmad
Fathi Zaghlul, had in fact fiercely opposed it.48 Although his brother Sa’d
Zaghlul rejected membership, a number of historians would later accuse him
of having secretly supported it, exclusively on the grounds that he had been one
of ʿAbduh’s closest friends and disciples.49 Amin himself had in fact refused to
join the party or subscribe to its paper, al-Garida, which he regarded with great
suspicion until his death. Belying the claims that Amin was a British lackey,
which have circulated uncritically, we see that Amin expressed deep admiration
for Kamil’s politics, despite their disagreements over the veil.50 Amin described
Kamil’s funeral, only two months before his own, as one of two moments in
which he heard Egypt’s heart beat: ‘the spirit of solidarity [rose] brilliantly
above the heads of people on the streets and roads’.51
Personnel aside, it is difficult to identify any distinct intellectual features of
an ʿAbduh ‘school of thought’. Hourani alleged that the ʿAbduh school was
defined by its espousal of ijtihād (the rational interpretation of texts by lay-
men), rather than the taqlīd (tradition) of conservative clerics.52 But ʿAbduh’s
26
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
27
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Egyptian press for months. The resultant furore unleashed by the book’s pub-
lication prompted over thirty ripostes; by Amin’s death in 1908 he had been
socially disgraced and politically ostracised by all but a very few.
One of his critics, Harb, the future father of economic nationalism, feared
that Amin’s text might not bring about the desired national emancipation but
instead provoke further imperialist intervention. He argued that Amin’s rep-
resentation of Muslim women echoed those of European orientalists. Europe
had long wanted to put an end to ‘backwards’ Muslim practices, he wrote, ‘to
bring the Eastern and Western worlds closer to one another’ in order to make
the former subservient to the latter. Harb pointed to the deposed khedive as
a cautionary tale: Isma‘il was so enamoured with Europe that he wanted Egypt
to become part of it. He encouraged women to walk barefaced in the streets,
so that there would seem to be less to distinguish Egypt from Europe, and in
doing so, Isma‘il set the stage for the country’s colonisation.56 As with the
abolition of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, Europeans would claim that
Muslim women were not free, as a pretext to forcibly ‘liberate’ them in the
name of humanitarianism. Harb explained,
You see … the strange compassion they have towards Eastern women, and the ways
they lament her situation. Despite [the rights she has according to the shariʿa] …
they persist in believing that the Muslim woman is miserable, as though she had
appointed them as defender of her rights, or as though they wanted all the world’s
women to become miserable and debased—due to excessive and broad liberties—
like the [Western woman].57
It was only by maintaining cultural difference that Egypt could ward off
further imperial incursions. Although Harb’s book-length response would
draw on religious texts, its stated mission was political.
Another of Amin’s most scathing critics was al-Hizb al-Watani leader
Mustafa Kamil. But Kamil’s objection was neither to Amin’s orientalism nor
to his hidden class motivations (as Leila Ahmed has suggested), but to the
‘absolute liberty’ that he advocated.58 Kamil was appalled that Amin’s support-
ers thought that ‘the freedom of women, with whatever harm it brings—even
adultery—is preferable to the oppressive veil’.59 He countered, ‘Freedom that
kills honour is by far more evil than a veil which kills vice.’ It was better, he
claimed, ‘for a man to feel that he is dying and being buried than it is for him
to see a female relative … committing adultery’. Comparing Egypt with the
United States, Kamil concluded that ‘the freedom that women know there is
not appropriate for Egypt and other Islamic nations because of the difference
in manners and customs between them’.60 Kamil did not foreclose the possibil-
28
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
29
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
about the relationship between power and knowledge that had made possible
certain forms of imperial rule. I am suggesting that Amin intuited the tremen-
dous import of simultaneously rejecting orientalist representations that legiti-
mated colonial rule in Egypt, while also insisting on the importance of
self-critical reflections on his society. That he did so in different languages
suggests, to me at least, that the author was being carefully strategic. He did
not want his self-critical thought to be abused, for pernicious ends, by Egypt’s
foreign critics, who might use it as evidence of the country’s backwardness as
they advanced their own political agendas.
Scholars who have insisted that Amin’s liberal position was anti-nationalist
have treated Kamil’s response to him as genuinely nationalist. Ahmed, for
example, argues that Kamil represented a more ‘authentic’ feminism, one that
was truly anti-imperial and grounded in the Islamic heritage.66 But an exami-
nation of his line of argumentation shows greater intellectual intimacy
between Kamil and Amin than has been acknowledged. And further, Ahmed’s
argument can be sustained only through a very partial reading of Kamil’s
thought. In his voluminous writings, speeches and letters, one can see that
Kamil’s ontology was not fundamentally different from Amin’s. He did not
oppose Amin’s social Darwinist claims nor his racio-civilisational hierarchies.
Moreover, both men shared a belief in their nation’s backwardness, even if
they disagreed on how to overcome it. In other words, Kamil too accepted
some of the basic premises of orientalist representation. Furthermore, it is
unclear why Amin’s anti-veiling position should have the particular class
valence that Ahmed and Walid Kazziha ascribe to it, since its fiercest critics
belonged to the exact same class as he did.67
The characterisation of Kamil’s thought as Islamic, in contrast to the secu-
larising ʿAbduh circle, ignores the fact that Kamil asserted the importance of
cultural difference, not theology. Kamil’s ‘Islam’ was a disenchanted mode of
communal identification, neither a faith nor a set of embedded ritual prac-
tices. Formulated in opposition to and despite colonialism, it appeared to
emerge from the depths of an immaculate and inviolate past. Yet Kamil’s
notion of Islam as a culture—a set of manners and customs—owed as much
to colonial thought as did Amin’s. His insistence on conditionally deferring
the liberation of women until his compatriots were sufficiently educated was
a disagreement not with Amin’s aims, but with his process. Like his rivals,
Kamil believed that political emancipation could not be achieved until man
emancipated himself from his passions. It was only through the mastery of
one’s desires and habits that man could become rational and therefore truly
30
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
liberated. As I will explore in the next section, far from being illiberal, Kamil’s
argument and its underlying assumptions were similar to those of his critics,
even if his conclusions were fundamentally different.
The debate surrounding women’s emancipation cannot illustrate the
unbridgeable divide between ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ varieties of Islam; rather,
what it does suggest is that a notion of a ‘liberal Islam’, defined as a series of
topical stances—such as against veiling or polygamy—rather than as a proce-
dural mode of political argumentation or abstraction, might obscure more than
it illuminates. It risks muddling the content of intellectuals’ ideas with their
political positions, confusing our own analytic categories with theirs, and ulti-
mately reproducing polemical taxonomies that belong to the colonial archive.
Though they disagreed on many issues, Hizb al-Umma leader Lutfi al-Sayyid
and his al-Hizb al-Watani counterparts Kamil and Jawish shared a deep con-
cern with metaphysics. While these preoccupations appear to confirm Partha
Chatterjee’s oft-repeated claim that anticolonial nationalists operated, above
all, in ‘the domain of the spiritual’, on closer examination it becomes clear
that such ‘spiritual’ meditations were inseparable from their concerns with
the ‘material’.68 In other words, the anticolonial activists’ extensive investiga-
tions into human nature were necessary for beginning the process of imagin-
ing alternative political futures to those mapped out by the British. All three
men understood that the Cromerian economistic project, which posited
self-interest as the fundamental and universal principle upon which to erect
a political order, could be rejected only if the notion of human nature upon
which it was predicated was itself reconsidered, refuted or reimagined. For
all three, even realism about politics needed metaphysical consideration,
because it was predicated on coming to terms with man’s true nature and his
inevitable tendencies.
Like Harb before them, these three intellectuals turned to the topic of
slavery—abolished in Egypt during their lifetimes—to articulate their ideas
on the metaphysics of Muslim freedom.69 According to colonial administra-
tors, both slavery and ‘the problem of women’—clearly linked in the writings
of Harb—were the domains in which Muslims’ alleged barbarism was most
manifest; discussions of these two topics, in turn, became the basis upon
which Muslim intellectuals made their case for political sovereignty. All three
intellectuals argued that a man could not willingly agree to be a slave, for man
31
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
was a mere custodian of his freedom, the true ownership of which was God’s
alone. To give away one’s freedom to a master or king—or even to the state—
was thus a blasphemous act. On the basis of this claim, they opposed any form
of liberal argument that valorised procedure over content, arguing forcefully
against a belief that illiberal actions could be tolerated so long as they were
shown to be procedurally liberal.70
For Kamil, the author of an 1892 treatise on Roman slavery, it was the
Abyssinians’ successful resistance against the Italian invasion of 1895–6 that
demonstrated beyond doubt that freedom was not something that could be
taught or learnt but was, rather, inborn in all humans. The proof, according to
Kamil, was that the Abyssinians were neither tutored in ‘Western science and
education’ nor civilised, unlike the Egyptians, who had been exposed to mod-
ern forms of knowledge for at least a century.71 This was unequivocal evidence
that the will to freedom was not nurtured but innate and that British claims
to the contrary ought to be rejected. It was these very same claims about
Egyptians’ servile nature that had provided the British with a discursive ploy
to further justify the former’s enslavement.72
While Kamil’s argument was generated by secular history, his successor,
Jawish, would make a similar set of claims through theology. Born in
Alexandria in 1876, Jawish succeeded Kamil as the editor of the nationalist
organ al-Liwa’ in 1908.73 It was during his time as lecturer in Arabic at Oxford
that Jawish first encountered bigotry against Islam. In response to his Oxford
students’ characterisation of Islam as a religion of slavery, polygamy and
divorce, Jawish formulated the book-length apologia Islam: The Religion of
Freedom and Instinct.74 Drawing upon history and theology, Jawish forcefully
argued against hegemonic colonial claims that Muslims were slave-like as a
result of their particular racio-cultural constitution. His anti-orientalism, like
that of Lutfi al-Sayyid, was closely linked to a particular political project, one
that rejected the racial hierarchies of colonial rule that understood Egyptians
to be essentially and constitutionally irreformable. Indeed, he and Lutfi al-
Sayyid both understood that the orientalism of Lord Cromer had successfully
disguised a prescriptive project of political subjugation in the clothes of a
value-neutral description. Both intellectuals realised that to change the world,
they first had to describe it anew.
For Jawish, Islam did not ‘contradict human instinct’; rather, it was the
purest reflection of it.75 As a pedagogue, Jawish contended that it was bad
forms of acculturation which, like religiously prohibited acts of bodily mutila-
tion, alienated children from their instincts. Were a child ‘left alone without
32
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
33
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
34
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
ple whose only sin was to demand that the nation be sovereign.85 Those
events—in which patriots were ‘hauled into the depths of prisons like crimi-
nals’—intensified Lutfi al-Sayyid’s beliefs on the nature of human liberty,
which he had only tangentially articulated in the past. He argued along
Jawish’s theological lines that ‘liberty is an innate gift granted by God to every
individual’, and therefore no ‘human being can despoil another of his liberty’.
The nation, as ‘a collective of individuals’, ought to be free. By extension, no
individual in this collective can surrender his liberty, because to do so ‘would
imply possession in the first place’. Freedom, being the property of God, was
not a human ‘possession’. It was ‘neither the property of the person in whom
it dwells’ nor that of anyone else. Consequently, no individual could voluntar-
ily give it away. Lutfi al-Sayyid reasoned that ‘Any such gift would be truly void
… In this way no king could claim that his people are slaves to him even if they
give him their liberty as a gift.’86
Because man was merely the custodian of his liberty, to forsake it was, para-
doxically, the one voluntary act that Lutfi al-Sayyid believed to be in principle
illegitimate. Such practices of wilful enslavement were prevalent among all
classes. Men behaved like ‘salon dogs’ that seek the approval of their masters,
abandoning their beliefs simply to satisfy the authorities.87 Accustomed to
receiving instruction from above, had Egyptians lost the capacity to judge
right from wrong? The tyranny of the khedive and his British accomplices was
reflected in every single aspect of society, and therefore it was ‘impossible to
talk of social problems and political ones as distinct’, Lutfi al-Sayyid argued,
for one produced the other.88 Egypt’s educational systems interpolated politi-
cal tyranny downwards into society, having been built on blind subservience.89
In the kuttāb (mosque schoolroom), ignorant schoolteachers murdered their
students’ ‘instinctive liberty’ through insults and punishments; in the Jesuit
schools, the masters forced boys to ‘kiss the ground’.90 This self-abasement
could be overcome only through reviving the principles of the Muslim faith,
by instilling submission to God and not to man.
Lutfi al-Sayyid wrestled with a dilemma: Would ending tyranny, through
the immediate enactment of self-sovereignty, be sufficient as a means of eman-
cipation, or would it merely expose Egyptians to the very same dangers—mili-
tary and imperial—that had produced tyranny in the first place? Either way,
he was certain that self-rule would be rendered meaningless were it not
accompanied by a programme wherein individuals would learn to rule their
passions. By 1907, it had become clear that the colonial state could not be
relied upon to enact any such programmatic reform in education, and had
35
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
36
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
37
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
ism would lead to a new form of slavery, it was the colonial vision of
economistic freedom of exchange and contract that he feared most acutely. He
implicitly criticised Kamil and Jawish for denying the psychological power,
and the irreconcilability, of individuals’ inevitable tendency towards self-
interest. Instead of denying the truth of man’s selfishness, he argued, one had
to harness its power, to align self-interests with national interests, so that the
two would become indistinguishable. When individuals learn to rule their
passions and attain ‘the characteristic of self-autonomy’, the autonomy of the
nation would follow ‘without delay’.106 This was the sole guarantor against
future tyrants.107 It was an idea similar to Kamil’s on the emancipation of
women: individuals must first learn to master themselves through a process of
ethical self-disciplining in order to make possible other forms of liberation.
For both Lutfi al-Sayyid and Kamil, no tyranny was more dangerous than that
of man’s unruly, intractable, spirit. One might overturn any number of politi-
cal regimes, but so long as man remained incapable of ruling himself, he would
remain forever incarcerated, and thus a slave.
This view was fundamentally different from that of Harb, who embodied a
line of nativist thought that insisted that Egypt’s enemy was to be located
externally, not internally. Harb had defended the prescription of the face veil
because it clearly marked the difference between the Egyptian and her
European mistress. An erosion of that difference would amount to an erosion
of the Egyptian nation itself. Difference had to be continually reproduced,
such that the line between Self and Other would not fade. But Lutfi al-Sayyid
feared that Harb’s nativist approach might effect an unravelling in the fabric
of the nation. Would the nation remain intact if the enemy was defeated?
Moreover, in a world in which the so-called sovereign was hamstrung by impe-
rial imperatives, who could determine who the enemy would be? If it fell to
the struggle of each individual, surely nothing but chaos would ensue. This
was a perennial and constitutive problem within the tradition of Muslim
political thought: Did the Qurʾanic imperative of commanding good and
forbidding evil fall on the individual or ought the task fall to some sovereign-
appointed figure lest chaos ensue?
Critics of Harb’s nativism argued that having a shared enemy was the only
thing that made Egypt’s diverse inhabitants become friends. But did the
nation need to wait for a stranger to threaten its borders in order to rise ‘like
one man’? What if the true enemy was internal to Egypt and to every
Egyptian, an enemy against whom he had to struggle daily? The commitment
of al-Garida’s editors to the struggle against the self through a process of auto-
38
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
critique is captured in the quotation they printed beneath the masthead: ‘He
who carefully examines the truth and makes his peace with it even if it is
painful at the first instance, will be happier when criticised by people than if
praised by them.’ The aphorism was a quotation from the eleventh-century
Andalusian polymath Ibn Hazm, available to Egyptians in print since 1905.108
It was the duty of the newspaper, self-critical and self-reflexive, to identify the
internal enemy, which Lutfi al-Sayyid argued was self-interest, the crude ego-
ism of every individual. Conversely, the public good was the common friend
of all. The sacred union between Muslims and non-Muslims could only be
born if each individual recognised that he harboured within himself the com-
mon enemy. It was only when man waged continuous jihad against his own
inner antagonist that he would find oneness in the national body politic.
In Lutfi al-Sayyid’s reasoning, although the nation was itself natural,
national unity was not: it had to be continually produced and reproduced.
Unaware as he might have been of the cultural construction that made imag-
ined communities appear natural, Lutfi al-Sayyid understood that merely
belonging to a community was very different from being willing to die in its
defence, and he contemplated how the latter might be induced. To breed men
who would willingly die for the nation, Lutfi al-Sayyid insisted on the neces-
sity of a political education, for only then would the Egyptian subject truly
understand where the public good lies, and sacrifice his life and property in
the defence of the state.109 He accused his opponents in al-Hizb al-Watani of
valorising cultural difference between nations, and not sufficiently appreciat-
ing individual difference within the nation of Egypt itself. Lutfi al-Sayyid
rejected the Watanist notion of the nation as a single party on the grounds of
its disagreement with human nature. Of the phrase ‘the nation is a single
party’, he wrote, ‘there are no words more beautiful’. But this was an unrealis-
able ideal: those that demand that ‘12 million must think as one’ were surely
‘ignorant of human nature’. Even as all Egyptians were united by the love of a
single goal—independence—they were so different in nature that it was
impossible for them to achieve those ends as a single party.110 Lutfi al-Sayyid
celebrated the eclecticism that formed individual desire: some princes willed
large fortunes to their cats; a pasha willed a large sum of money to the dogs of
Istanbul; Alfred Nobel created a place for people to commit suicide free of
pain or torture.111
These examples of human difference were evidence for him that the struggle
to produce a national unit had to come from within. Each individual had to
wrestle against his internal agonist, since any externally imposed unity would
39
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
entail a degree of coercion. It was only through internal struggle that the
nation could come into being. In contrast to tyranny, which caused servility,
Lutfi al-Sayyid argued that the internal struggle against one’s ego ought to be
celebrated. Invoking the mystical ideal of losing oneself in God, he praised the
Sufi who ‘drowns in horizons much greater than his own’, ridding himself of
the ‘filth of the material’ in order to enjoy the purity of nakedness. It was in
this way that an individual should relate to the nation, such that he would
become a servant to it. He had to overcome his personal interests, forget and
annihilate his Self for the interests of the corporate whole. Instead of denud-
ing a man of his capacity to make moral judgements—as enslavement was
bound to do—it allowed him to transcend the pursuit of ‘lowly and common
pleasures, and replace them with eternal beautiful ones’.
The exemplar of this practice for Lutfi al-Sayyid was his old friend Qasim
Amin, who, in the first of his two controversial Arabic works, had emphasised
the importance of internal jihad. Amin was the paragon of this daily battle
waged against personal interest in favour of the common good:
Qasim Amin … was a Sufi in his beliefs … I have not seen or read a writer as great
as him, someone who leant towards the sacralisation of love or the extolment of
adoration to the same extent as did Qasim’s delicate and sensitive soul, which
would lose itself every day in the attempt to make sense of this unknown truth, such
that he became a believer in platonic love [al-hawā al-ʿudhrī], which is evidence for
the nobility of his spirit and a step on the route to perfection …112
Comparing Amin to ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabiʿa,113 Lutfi al-Sayyid writes that
nothing could be veiled—an appropriate metaphor for a man devoted to
unveiling—from his sharp gaze. His blazing thought could illuminate that
which was murky. Amin believed that the truth of human knowledge always
contained error, just as error always contained some degree of truth. As a
judge, Amin was as deeply committed to understanding human responsibility
as he was to understanding culpability. As a result of his profession, he
believed that attributing responsibility correctly was difficult, and in fact
beyond human capacity, because man could never be entirely autonomous.
Instead ‘human beings inherited their akhlāq [ethics], their nerves, their
tarbīya [upbringing], their belief (its strength or weakness), and all the psy-
chological conditions that make a sinner commit a sin’.114 After many years,
Amin concluded that ‘forgiveness’ was the single means towards human per-
fectibility, and ought to be the chief goal of one’s upbringing.
In his description of Amin, and in other passages, Lutfi al-Sayyid conceives
of ethics not as a set of regulatory norms or ideas, but as a set of activities
40
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
41
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
from endorsing the law as an instrument of moral reform, Amin, Lutfi al-
Sayyid and others pointed to its very limits. It was not enough for British
colonial administrators to proudly declare that they had granted the Egyptians
absolute personal liberty, Lutfi al-Sayyid reasoned. The package of reforms
that had named personal liberty as the objective had largely been successful;
so much so that the parents of young men had decried the new freedoms as a
form of fanaticism. Moreover, Egyptian laws were more lax than those of
virtually any European country. For example, unlike German law, it did not
forbid suicide. As Lutfi al-Sayyid explained, ‘Where German law punishes
attempts at suicide, Egyptian law allows man to do with himself as he
pleases.’121 But this form of liberty, nothing more than the absence of external
impediments to action, was not sufficient. This ‘fanaticism’ for freedom in
Egyptian law could never be a substitute for the programme of moral disci-
pline that the government ought to undertake. It was only by ‘devoting atten-
tion to political life’—not through the legal reforms aimed at personal liberty
or the economic reforms for material prosperity—that a government could
succeed in its self-avowed mission of preparing the nation for self-rule.122
When I speak of the ‘liberal cage’, I mean to convey that the questions asked
and answered a century ago remain ineluctable to Muslims today. Early
twentieth-century intellectuals were caught between two contradictory but
equally powerful modes of colonial representation: one cast Muslims as essen-
tially tyrannical and in need of liberation from themselves, and the other as
lacking the will to be free and therefore unworthy of the rights guaranteed to
their fellow men. Both of these claims had provided justification for imperial
domination. In order to reject the forms of subjugation that they legitimised,
intellectuals first needed to refute their substance. Then, as now, intellectuals
found that they were incapable of wresting themselves from endless cycles of
orientalist representation and refutation.
The figures examined here appealed to two antithetical strategies, with
some figures vacillating between them. The first form of refutation argued that
the lack of freedom in Islam was mere misrepresentation. Describing differ-
ence as deficiency, imperial agents universalised the parochial experience of
the West and imposed it on the rest. This was precisely Harb’s argument
against women’s desegregation. It is an argument that was revived, almost a
century later, by Talal Asad, Uday Mehta and Saba Mahmood, among oth-
42
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
ers.123 Harb maintained that the cynical imperial impulses that hid behind a
mask of humanitarianism—for instance, in the case of the abolition of slav-
ery—ought to be resisted. Muslims’ particular culture, theology and history
should provide the basis for resisting the West’s compulsion to make the world
in its image. Even as Harb—and some would argue, Mahmood—implied that
the slave did not want to be freed, such an argument was made, paradoxically,
to advance the cause of national freedom.
Recognising that masters had long used the claim that slaves did not want
to be free to justify their subjugation, intellectuals such as Lutfi al-Sayyid
perceived that this first strategy, typified by Harb, was self-defeating. Most
importantly, they argued that it was necessary to distinguish between the
content of the values promoted and the ‘concrete’, nefarious imperial agents
that advocated them. Individuals across the political party divides recognised
that their unsatisfied demands—for representation, for access to education,
for press freedom—could not be made in terms of particularity or Muslim
difference but only by appeal to the universal rights shared by everyone, yet
from which, they correctly pointed out, their people had been excluded.
Instead of denying the validity of such rights wholesale, they highlighted the
incoherence of limiting universal rights to particular subjects. Muslims were
not foreign to the universal desires—such as that for freedom—shared by
their European counterparts, and as Kamil argued, any denial of this univer-
sal desire would merely reinforce the claims that had made colonialism pos-
sible in the first place.124 Despite Cromer’s assertions to the contrary, Islam
was a faith, not a culture, and therefore a reformed, ‘liberal Islam’ was no
ontological impossibility.
These two responses, when taken out of the imperial context that produced
them and divorced from the hegemonic claims against which they were for-
mulated, suggest substantive disagreement about the metaphysical nature of
man upon which a political vision should be built. The first response claimed
that Muslim happiness was not realised by freedom but by submission to God,
whereas the second argued that Muslims—like their brothers and sisters else-
where—were innately freedom-loving. One can see how they might be mis-
taken for pointing towards sparring political projects, one illiberal, the other
liberal. One might even be tempted to conclude that Harb himself was illib-
eral, and that Kamil, Lutfi al-Sayyid and Jawish were liberal. But to do so
would be to privilege words shorn of action. Instead, if ‘liberal’ is to have any
analytic utility at all, it is best understood as a characterisation of an argument,
not of an individual. Although they made competing arguments, it was not
43
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
44
ARABIC THOUGHT IN THE LIBERAL CAGE
he has long been placed. The desire to uncover a shameful and foreign geneal-
ogy for Amin’s ideas, however, makes it difficult for both scholars to see that
Amin was primarily responding to a lively local debate, not merely parroting
the ‘pious pronouncements of British imperialists’.127 Amin’s ideas had long
circulated elsewhere—in articles, back pages and pamphlets written by
authors (some of them women) who were neither middle class nor French-
educated. These marginal authors, largely written out of history, were often
rooted in, and appealed to, various Muslim traditions, making it impossible to
characterise them as ‘secular’ or secularising. Amin was simply one in a long
series of commentators who did not spark the debate but rather entered it in
full progress. A more serious effort to decentralise Amin and other intellectu-
als like him would begin with this fact and would attempt to understand him
not as an innovator, but as an astute observer. The elite intellectuals examined
in this chapter did not merely co-opt subaltern ‘energies’ in the service of
imported and alien projects imposed from above but were fundamentally
shaped by ‘subaltern political commitments’ from below.128 If anything, from
1908 onwards Hizb al-Umma was attacked by its opponents not for espousing
liberal norms, but for promoting ideas that were not liberal enough.129 To
recognise this is to acknowledge how central—indeed, inescapable—these
arguments were becoming, at multiple levels of society, in the growing move-
ment towards national sovereignty.
45
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CORRUPTING POLITICS
47
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Since then, the Nahḍa has been the paradigm through which the question
‘what does it mean to be Arab?’ has been asked and answered. The word adāb
as it emerged in formative Nahḍa works was used to signify culture in broad
terms.1 In its modern instantiation, culture cannot simply be read as a
‘Europeanisation’ of the conceptual universe of societies the world over, but
as what ‘has served to de-Europeanize the concepts that constitute the now
global thought forms of modernity’.2 The object of cultural discourse ‘is a
historically determinate form of human subjectivity’ that is ultimately
‘grounded in structures of social practice’3 specific to capitalist society. In a
society that is organised around commodity production and exchange, the
individual subject is split between two roles, one of practical activity (the
liberal pursuit of private interests in civil society) and the other of a practical
activity through which the individual strives to tame nature and to achieve a
unity with the social totality (culture).4 This split subjectivity is precisely the
thing whose wholeness culture attempts to restore, yet culture proves to be
excessive, sacrificial and transgressive of economy: its utility or value appear to
lie in its precise functional uselessness. Thus, it becomes necessary to define
culture, to attempt to capture it, and to identify its functions or purposes. This
quest was the primary Nahḍa pursuit.
‘Arab culture’ in its Nahḍa formulation expresses the tensions inherent in
the formation of a universal form of consciousness from a particular position.
The Nahḍa was neither an imported discursive body of thought nor an ‘alter-
native modernity’. Rather, Nahḍa is saturated with the contradictions and
incommensurability of capitalist modernity in its liberal form. Despite the
multiple critiques of liberalism for its cultureless universality, the relationship
between culture and liberalism requires further elaboration for they both
seem to emerge as an antinomic pair of capitalist social forms. It is the site of
politics or the political that remains to be determined, and in order to get
there we must be able to ascertain the retreat of politics, its scarcity in both
liberalism and culturalism. This chapter tracks the path of this retreat in
Nahḍa discourse.
The Nahḍa carried within it the fantasy of attaining ‘the good life’ in which
atomistic liberal individualism allowed individuals to be perceived as free to
engage in relations of commodity exchange and to be confronted by society
as an external entity. However, the pursuit of private interest needed to be
complemented by a fantasy of achieving a higher subjective unity with the
social totality—in other words, a unity between one’s internal desires and
their symbolic function in society. This fantasy betrayed moments of excess,
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CORRUPTING POLITICS
of the inability of liberal subjectivity to fully fold in on itself. Thus, the logic
of antinomy cannot be so tightly bound, for there are moments in which
subjectivity becomes possible precisely because of its failed interpellation.5 In
other words, culture can never really achieve a unity between the subject and
the social totality despite offering that possibility. Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s 1860
translation of Robinson Crusoe6 and his invocation of the story as the ideal of
liberal individualism was complemented by Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s transla-
tion of parts of Don Quixote: with the former we have the retroactive anticipa-
tion of civil society and a society of exchange and with the latter a tragicomic
escape from the symbolic order that leads to Quixotian madness. In other
words, there cannot be culture without excesses and untamable elements. It is
this dialectic of culture and its untamable excesses, I will argue, that emerges
in Nahḍa as a duel between global consciousness and universal consciousness
in a particular position. These forms of consciousness are distinct: ‘for global
consciousness, conflicts are generated through external differences between
cultures and societies whereas universality … signifies the possibility of a
shared opening to the agitation and turbulence immanent to any construction
of identity, the Unheimlichkeit or uncanniness internal to any and every space
we call home’.7
Claiming that there is a universalist impulse in Nahḍa requires some elabo-
ration, given the tenacious history of the concept of universalism and the
over-abundance of its critique as a discourse inhabited by the white, male,
dominant subject position. The political importance of the various critiques
of universalism is unquestionable for they address the oppressive, racist, sexist
and other partial interests that have laid claim to universalism over the past
centuries. However, the question remains of how to articulate a pure particu-
lar position without contrast with a universal. Rather than dismissing the
concept of universalism altogether while promoting a shaky universality of
difference in its place, it is important to consider universalism as the inherent
attribute of any particular lifeworld: the sole obstacle to the closure of a life
world as a totality. In other words, universalism only emerges from a particular
life world when it becomes evident that there is an unresolvable tension, a
deadlock in the identity of the particular life world that can no longer be
resolved through its own terms.
While the exclusionary aspects of liberalism have been emphasised by many
scholars, the heterogeneous nature of liberalism and its openness to plural
identity formations remains to be considered. Andrew Sartori’s work on the
concept of culture in Bengal provides a critical engagement with the assump-
49
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
tion that liberalism excludes culture: ‘the culture-concept has never been
incompatible with liberal thought, even when that liberalism grounded itself
in the object historical processes of civilisational development. “Culture”
could supplement the more classically liberal, negative conception of emanci-
pation from the illegitimate exercise of State authority, with the positive con-
ception of subjective freedom as a capacity to.’8 Although liberalism is the main
ideology of capitalist modernity, the presence and persistence of other con-
trasting ideologies is not something that can be dismissed. By claiming that
liberalism is both universal and exclusionary, critics of liberalism remain
grounded in cultural analysis. Even the harshest critics of liberalism wash up
on the shores of anti-Eurocentrism, resorting to the argument of ‘leave us our
culture’; what is missed in these analyses is a distinction between the false
universality of capitalism, which pivots around four fundamental concepts
enumerated by Marx (freedom, equality, property and ‘Bentham’), and the
universality of modernity. The false universality of liberalism functions as a
negative force that purports to destroy particularity, yet in fact sustains it and
eternalises its various forms around the globe—that is, it renders the distinc-
tion between the particular and universal a merely formal one.9 As capitalism
subsumed various societies around the globe, conflict was increasingly pre-
sented in terms of differences between cultures and societies. However, the
important site of difference that postcolonial thought has largely overlooked
is within culture and identity. I want to argue that the uncanniness of identity
emerged in Nahḍa early on: when identity came to be seen as inadequate,
increasingly foreign, and when the familiar came to be recognised as ulti-
mately strange. Humanism in the late nineteenth century, under the spread of
the concept of ‘civilisation’, presented itself as opposed to particularities,
which then required a separation of spheres: the internal cultural world was
to be cultivated and reformed, while the state administered the world of poli-
tics. This in turn set the stage for the emergence of nationalism—the univer-
sality of humanism being linked to the emergence, not the overcoming, of
national particularisms. This is in contradistinction to a concrete universality,
whose dictum would be the unsettling of particular identity from within,
rather than its ossification from without.
One of the distinctive traits of liberalism is the relegation of culture to a
realm that is ‘natural’ and outside politics. The split liberal subject is meant to
maintain culture, religion, faith and all other ‘idiosyncrasies’ within the pri-
vate realm, while the public is where the subject attains autonomy, freedom
and independence. Although this interpretation of liberalism deserves the
50
CORRUPTING POLITICS
critiques that have been posited against it, it is not entirely accurate to claim
that modernity’s sole universalism has been liberal politics. The critique of
universalism that emerges from that of liberalism risks dismissing responses to
the oppressive capacities of modernity that also carried universalist claims.
Moreover, the limits of the ‘emancipatory’ aspect of liberalism have been
exposed by fundamentalist ideologies, and it is the absence of a radically con-
ceived politics amid the deadlock between fundamentalism and liberalism
that remains the decisive factor in the present day. Against postcolonial posi-
tions on the matter, the emancipatory potential of recognising the contin-
gency of one’s own communitarian identity cannot remain unnoticed in
historiography. It is thus important to argue that although it was a form of
cultural politics, the Nahḍa also carried within it an anxiety for real universal-
ity, one that emerged from the recognition that as a modern Arab subject you
are no longer fully yourself. Nahḍa thinkers sought to define themselves as
both Arab and human, as the anxious participants in a universal history. Their
anxiety emerged from the desire for a modernity that seemed incommensurate
with the attempt to maintain a cultural identity. The cost of doing so was the
outright recognition and public disclosure of the uneasiness of fully identify-
ing as Arab.
Arabic in Nahḍa thought was seen as a sign of human civilisation and a means
for the preservation of the self. Although much time and effort was invested
in ordering the language by compiling lexicons, dictionaries and encyclopae-
dia, the obsession with language as the ‘mirror of the umma’ created hostility
to instrumental conceptions of language as a tool for communication or as a
commodity language. Nahḍa sources abound with descriptions of the work
on language as the diving into a ‘bottomless sea’10 from which there would be
no return. Shidyāq for one proclaimed, ‘My greatest ambition has been to dive
deep into the sea of this language.’11 The Arabic language’s ‘aesthetic secrets,
its wisdom, and the artistry of its making are to be brought out of conceal-
ment’.12 However, just as the sea reveals its presence and conceals its content
from the spectator, the sea of language is revealed to the student of Arabic and
concealed from them because of its bottomless expanse. To elucidate this
point further, I am suggesting here that this form of desire for language, in
which it is never to be fully attained, actually resists its transformation into an
object of national pedagogy. Shidyāq’s desire for Arabic, ‘the means to all the
51
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
sciences [al-ʿulūm] of this world and the hereafter’,13 signifies the turn of
Arabic from a language of elsewhere, of an imagined past, to a language of the
self as an other, to a ‘language like no other’.14 Often, Shidyāq would exclaim
that, as he attempted to conquer language, it conquered him, a fateful defeat
that offered him and his contemporaries a sense of enjoyment or jouissance.
The closer one came to Arabic, the farther it appeared to be and the more it
seemed to penetrate them from an elsewhere, speak through them rather than
the other way around. In this particular instance of identifying the self in the
image of Arabic, the subject believes in the fantasy of a community defined by
a language that is neither here nor there: an unconscious sea of language that
cannot be mastered. Arabic, which was meant to be the grounds of support of
the particular self, was a language foreign to spoken vernaculars, existing only
in the written form. In their attempts to master it, Nahḍa intellectuals pro-
claimed their failures one after the other. Shidyāq aptly captures this in his
claim, ‘as I sought to conquer the language I was defeated, and it conquered
me’.15 And just as there is something about Arabic that makes it unique and
unattainable as an object of desire, there is something about being Arab that
makes modernity seem farther away with every step closer to it.
If language was the looking glass through which the Arabs could catch a
glance of a singular identification from within the interstices of communal
identification, where does the image that is in the mirror actually come from?
There is a curious dissociation between an image and the mirror it appears on;
in a sense, the image that is in the mirror always exists in something else. The
oft-deployed metaphor of Arabic as a mirror expresses an anxiety about
boundaries, about interiority and exteriority. The act of writing under this
form of investment in the language permeated the nineteenth century in the
form of public texts (journalistic essays, treatise, books and works of fiction).
But writing somehow disentangled language from presence, and thereby from
its role as a tool of communication. Language was made to act as a Janus-faced
creature with a public and private face. Moreover, language became the media-
tor between the interior and the exterior: it was the signifier of indeterminacy
rather than a reflection of a unified identity. The empire of Arabic did not
coincide with any real subject with which it could be identified, remaining an
impossible object.
This discourse on lugha (Arabic) in Nahḍa sources was supplemented with
a focus on morality. Indeed, it can be argued that morality preceded politics
in the Nahḍa. While liberal utopians like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mills and
others sought to get rid of moral temptations and to establish a form of value-
52
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53
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
54
CORRUPTING POLITICS
master’s discourse.29 The object of the university discourse30 is not simply the
‘accumulation and deployment of knowledge concerning bodily life’ but an
extra element, a ‘strange and material presence of the disappearing king’.31 This
shift in the social discourse depicted in Shidyāq’s writing exposes the ‘bareness
of human communities’32 as they attempt to cover their nudity; their exposure
in modernity, for it is in the very efforts to single out an original state for a
community that it appears that it is impossible to identify one. It is thus not
surprising that Shidyāq argues that the motto for sociality should not be ‘do
unto others as you would have them do unto you’ but rather ‘know thyself ’.33
Shidyāq’s perception of human nature, the role of habits in society, the
necessary corruption of politics, led him to propose reform and adaptation,
islāh wa ta‘dīl, as temporary solutions for society. There are only temporary
solutions for Shidyāq, which all rely on habits and conventions that are in turn
themselves ephemeral. If the people ought to aid the state in fulfilling its aims,
as he claimed, then we can see the body of the king living on among the people
through a displacement of authority. But the aim of preserving wellbeing leads
to a deadening of oneself; the aim of knowing oneself is not to criticise author-
ity but to obey it. ‘Humankind is instinctively evil and corrupt’, hence one
must recognise one’s own limited knowledge: to ‘know thyself ’ rather than to
‘think for oneself ’. Questioning certain habits (polygamy, consumerism, imi-
tating European ways, attitudes towards women, indolence and unproductiv-
ity, the gluttony of aristocrats, ornate language that lacks real meaning, etc.)
goes hand in hand with knowing oneself: it is a new form of biopolitics that
the Nahḍa discourse instils. Self-knowledge assumes that one can reflect upon
the very subject doing the reflecting. Even in the Nahḍa work on Arabic, it
was largely assumed that one could somehow step outside language to confirm
that it could indeed express a truth about the world in which one existed. The
irony of Nahḍa thought is that the criticism of habit and tradition, as well as
language, was only possible by exiting them. Irony, as Paul de Man suggests, is
a process of duplication of the self, a specular structure within the self, which
muddles the relationship with history. Irony arises precisely when the subject
can no longer recognise itself as a historical subject.
Shidyāq maintained that the material processes of consumerism and com-
modification estranged humankind from its elevated status among other
creatures. Wreathing against nineteenth-century liberal modernity evidently
produced a discourse of morality: the problem was that modernisation only
made people ‘evil, repugnant, desiring, stubborn, envious, spiteful, cruel and
aggressive, fearful and rash’.34 Modern civilisation was ‘like bitter water, the
55
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
more you drank it the thirstier you would become’.35 Shidyāq’s autobiographi-
cal novel Al-Sāq ‘ala al-sāq depicts his own bodily and physical contortions
that arise from his inability to inhabit any space of representation in moder-
nity. He appears in the book, in more ways than one, similar to the German
Daniel Paul Schreber,36 a body of excitable flesh, eroticised at every encounter
yet impotent, unable to capture the cause of his desire. It is surely no coinci-
dence that the very same liberal Ottoman reform that Shidyāq himself pro-
moted in his politics itself exceeded his own abilities to inhabit his reformism.
Shidyāq’s own response to the question posed by the Nahḍa discourse was to
make himself into a book in al-Saq: the autobiography’s central character
Faryaq (the author’s fictional double, a compound of the names Fāris and
Shidyāq) made his proper name common again. It is the answer to the para-
sitic nature of words, for language with Shidyāq appears as ‘a verbal parasite, a
parasitical cancer from which there is no escape’.37 The symptomatic repetition
of phonemically similar words in the book to be interrupted by abrupt sounds
like ‘shh!shh!’, ‘tiff !tiff !’, ‘azwa!azwa!’, tell of the attempts to silence speech in
the mind. Shidyāq’s emptying out of words in the middle of dark nights, his
‘blackening of the sheets of paper in the darkest of nights’ were an attempt to
liquefy language, an attempt to puncture a hole into the symbolic order of
habits, meanings and signification. He thus represents the limits of the Nahḍa
discourse, the limits at which Nahḍa as a discourse of progress begins to crum-
ble and crack.
In contrast to the individualistic and atomised conceptions of liberal politi-
cal thought, the subject in the Nahḍa discourse was perceived as an essentially
social being, a creature of habit. The problem with modernisation, however,
was that habit suddenly got in the way of social life. Soon after the eruption of
war in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, Buṭrus al-Bustānī gave a public speech
in Beirut to the Syrian Society for the Sciences. The speech’s content reveals
the obsessive-compulsiveness underlying the modern concept of society.
Al-Bustānī defines society, al-hayʾa al-ijtimāʿiyya, as being based on ‘the fulfill-
ment of the needs of individuals as well as the abetting of their fears’.38 Human
happiness, according to him, can only be attained by the satisfaction of needs.
This satisfaction can only proceed from the division of labour, with al-Bustānī
providing an extensive Smithian analysis of society.39 The logic of his analysis
is that society’s political and economic transformations reduce human rela-
tions to those of need, and that these are essentially more progressive than
those of tribal and ‘savage’ societies. The latter, according to al-Bustānī, have
fewer needs, rendering their mutual relations weak and their societies lacking
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57
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
58
CORRUPTING POLITICS
59
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
60
CORRUPTING POLITICS
61
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
The dissociation of politics from society has been understood as a central trait
of liberalism, and it is indeed called for by many Nahḍa intellectuals. However,
this dissociation excluded the central tenet of liberal governance, which is the
consent of the governed—another theme that is missing in Nahḍa sources.
Political representation remains limited to a relationship within which the
state is defined as the spirit of the people, rather than the other way around.54
The spirit is essential to the functioning of the body: the latter cannot exist
without the former. Often, Nahḍa intellectuals lamented the corruption of
the times they lived in, and proclaimed it a result of politics, siyāsa. Politics
was perceived as a corrupting realm, one that needed to be addressed by the
reform of the Arabs through the cultivation of good habits and morality. It
was as though politics was a source of corruption that needed to be kept at bay
so that society could pursue its true interests and fulfil its liberty.
The implications of the Nahḍa conception of habit on the thinking of sub-
jectivity and the meaning of political action are significant: when individual
habit is shaped by accommodation to external forces, as an internal feature it
becomes elevated into a disposition, the defining trait of an inner essence.
Thus, habits that are mandated by the external world become internal faculties
that define individuals: subjectivity emerges from its own disappearance.
Moreover, habits have the power to conceal the source of their origin, and
appear as natural traits. The Arab’s moustache appears as a natural trait for the
Arab, just as the European’s hairless face is natural to the European. Nahḍa
intellectuals often invoked this example to explain that the difference in habits
(here the reference is to facial grooming) was natural only insofar as it was
cultural. ‘Things in themselves cannot carry contradictory features; contradic-
tion and difference are the results of forces of habits and differences in tastes.’55
This same reasoning is used to explain the difference between primitive socie-
ties and civilised ones: the less civilised and less modern a society is, the less it
has needs and the means for satisfying them. The essence of the human is
therefore a social one—universal nature is always a second nature, while habits
are the originary essence of humankind.
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Politics came last in the Nahḍa, for it was a realm that could not be theo-
rised without the elucidation of the power of habits at both its ends: among
the governed and the governors. Politics as a site of agonistic conflict, one
experienced by Nahḍa intellectuals through wars and the rise of sectarianism,
proved to be a complicating factor for a society formed by habit. As we have
seen, underneath the harmonious appearance of the subject as a creature of
habit, is a mechanism for the splitting or erasure of subjectivity: the internal
world is essentially constructed on the outside, made to predict the external
world and to be instantiated by it. Action in the world is not meant to make
an individual consider their plurality, but rather seeks to reinforce an image of
the individual as a self-identical subject. This sociological determinism, one
that largely defined Nahḍa thought, entailed a not-so-clear distinction
between the public and the private, as well as between emotion and reason.
Habits blur this distinction: for one cannot will away a habit by reasoning, nor
can it be controlled in public.
By writing about habit, Nahḍa intellectuals took on the role of thinking
about a seemingly natural thing and subjected it to an intellectual interroga-
tion. Some habits appeared objectionable while others seemed commendable.
The focus on habits needs to be read as a commentary on the meaning of
social action, as well as something that reveals the anxiety underlying modern
subjectivity. Habits are at the core of defining the meaning of society in Nahḍa
thought and are central components of thinking about social action. There is
little distinction made between social action that is historically developed
(farming, industry) and natural (eating and digesting). Even eating habits, in
al-Bustānī’s analysis, evolved historically, with the only natural entity in his
analysis being human sociality. Listed as matters of habit in Nahḍa literature
was everything pertaining to social action: labour and productivity, indolence,
speech, writing, marriage, sex, consumption, customs, eating, drinking, walk-
ing, music and clothing. Habits impinge on the body, transform it, guide it
and manipulate its movements. Moreover, they are the cause of both virtue
and vice. The absence of a discussion of the faculty of reason proves to be a
departure from more familiarly liberal conceptions of subjectivity. It is only
through self-cultivation and the refinement of habit that an individual’s
rational faculties may come to mature. But happy endings remained far from
the truth in Nahḍa texts. Thus most of the population, safalat al-‘āmma, was
destined to remain in ignorance. Their ignorance was a corrupting factor for
society as a whole, yet freedom was not the solution but instead a gradual
transformation of habits.
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
64
3
ILLIBERAL ISLAM
Faisal Devji
On 19 July 1927, some twenty years before Britain departed its Indian empire,
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
movements, all of which sought at various times to contest or limit the idea of
nationality propounded by the Indian National Congress. Whether or not the
partisans of Hindu, Muslim, Dalit or Dravidian forms of nationality thought,
as did Iqbal in the passage quoted above, that a united Indian nation was a
future possibility, they all based their distrust of it on the grounds of political
reality. Given the historically entrenched and often legally sanctioned nature
of the differences and disparities between various caste, religious and other
groupings, how was it possible to think about the political representation and
interaction of India’s various parties in the absence of nationalism as a unifying
factor? Could a workable set of political relations emerge in such a situation?
What kind of state would they give rise to?
Indian nationalism was distrusted by men like Iqbal not only as a bad idea
but also as an unrealistic one, and it was to avoid the political consequences of
this idea that such men questioned the very language upon which Indian
nationalism was based. In essence, this was the procedural language of liberal-
ism, made up of a few fundamental categories including interest (the basic
political fact of liberalism), representation (the institutional organisation of
interests) and contract (the relationship between interests), all of which were
to be legitimated and guaranteed by a national state. If there was no Indian
nation, of course, interests could only be autonomous and formally unrelated
entities, representation could only be organised on transient and ephemeral
grounds, and contractual relations could only be held together by merely con-
tingent imperatives.
Naturally, the kind of state that governed such a situation could only be
some replica of the British Raj.
This possibility raised serious questions about the representation and inter-
action of India’s political units for Iqbal, as indeed for many of his country-
men, in the four or five decades before the partition of India in 1947.
Unfortunately, this entire period is today held hostage by the fact of this parti-
tion, so that it is only permissible to pose the following kinds of questions in
the historiography: Was the division of India inevitable? Did a Muslim nation
actually exist before the creation of Pakistan? These retrospective questions are
not particularly interesting. They certainly do nothing to illuminate the
vibrant political culture of India before partition, which subjected the basic
categories of liberal thought, interest, representation and contract to an
unprecedented interrogation. And it is important to note that it was over
these procedural categories, rather than over some merely academic definition
of nationhood, that Indian political debate occurred during this period.
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ILLIBERAL ISLAM
67
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
to the All-India Muslim Conference in March 1932, Iqbal had this to say
about the nature of India’s struggle for freedom:
The present struggle in India is sometimes described as India’s revolt against the
West. I do not think it is a revolt against the West; for the people of India are
demanding the very institutions which the West stands for. Whether the gamble
of elections, retinues of party leaders and hollow pageants of parliaments will suit
a country of peasants for whom the money-economy of modern democracy is
absolutely incomprehensible, is a different question altogether. Educated urban
India demands democracy. The minorities, feeling themselves as distinct cultural
units and fearing that their very existence is at stake, demand safeguards, which
the majority community, for obvious reasons, refuses to concede. The majority
community pretends to believe in a nationalism theoretically correct, if we start
from Western premises, belied by facts, if we look to India. Thus the real parties
to the present struggle in India are not England and India, but the majority com-
munity and the minorities of India which can ill-afford to accept the principle of
Western democracy until it is properly modified to suit the actual conditions of
life in India.2
Iqbal makes three points here that question the liberal enterprise of Indian
nationalism. The national struggle, he says, exists not between India and
Britain, but between India’s majority and minority communities, with the
latter standing to lose all their historical and juridical privileges in a singular
nation-state. Furthermore, the kind of democracy espoused by the nationalists
works to the advantage of the urban and educated classes they belong to,
because its freedoms of interest, representation and contract are characteristic
of a money economy that is foreign to India’s peasant majority. And finally,
the nationalist project not only ignores but actively subverts the religious
landscape of India. Politically, then, Iqbal followed the Muslim League, sup-
porting either a federal India divided into Hindu and Muslim majority prov-
inces, or a united India with a system of separate electorates and weightage.
Unlike Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who would end up founding Pakistan as
the League’s president, Iqbal did not support these options for purely nega-
tive reasons, because the special historical and constitutional conditions of
India did not permit the creation of a unitary nation-state there. Rather, he
saw the League’s curious politics of representation in an entirely positive
light because they seemed to stave off the nation-state in its liberal incarna-
tion. Iqbal opposed this latter for several reasons, disapproving, for instance,
of its glorification of territorial belonging and its metaphysical rather than
merely functional division of society into public and private realms, on the
same model, he thought, as the Christian separation of the material and the
68
ILLIBERAL ISLAM
spiritual. Thus the following passage from Iqbal’s 1930 presidential address
to the Muslim League:
Europe uncritically accepted the duality of spirit and matter probably from
Manichaean thought. Her best thinkers are realising this initial mistake today, but
her statesmen are indirectly forcing the world to accept it as an unquestionable
dogma. It is, then, this mistaken separation of spiritual and temporal which has
largely influenced European religious and political thought and has resulted practi-
cally in the total exclusion of Christianity from the life of European states. The
result is a series of mutually ill-adjusted states dominated by interests not human
but national. And these mutually ill-adjusted states after trampling over the morals
and convictions of Christianity, are today feeling the need of a federated Europe,
i.e., the need of a unity which Christian church-organisation originally gave them,
but which instead of reconstructing it in the light of Christ’s vision of human
brotherhood they considered it fit to destroy under the inspiration of Luther.3
Iqbal maintained that territorial belonging, in the populist form it assumed
with the nation-state, destroyed or at the very least enfeebled all ethical or ide-
alistic imperatives in political life, making for an international regime of paro-
chial and so continuously warring interests: a condition he thought was brought
into being with the Protestant Reformation, whose individualisation of religion
and revolt against the universality of the Roman Catholic Church spiritually
ushered in the reign of the nation-state. Moreover, territorial belonging led to
the dominance of property over all the relations of social life, such that all inter-
ests became interests of ownership. Indeed, the nation-state could even be char-
acterised by a mode of knowledge for which the world was composed entirely
of things that had to be grasped proprietorially, by discursive reasoning alone.
Representation, then, whether epistemological or political, was the very
model of discursive reason because it grasped both persons and objects as
forms of property, to be weighed, counted and worshipped not only in the
practices of democracy but also in those of knowledge as such. This criticism
of the liberal nation-state is of course similar in many respects to its Marxist
analysis, something that Iqbal recognised and wrote about, dedicating a num-
ber of fine verses in admiration of Marx, Lenin and bolshevism. Indeed, for
Iqbal, communism was religion’s (and especially Islam’s) only rival in the criti-
cism of a liberal state and its order of representation, although he thought it
infinitely worse than the latter. Communism, according to Iqbal, by transfer-
ring all property to the state, actually made it an even more oppressive pres-
ence in public life, and even more destructive of ethics as conviction and ideal.
In this sense, he thought that atheistic materialism necessarily smuggled back
into everyday life the very functions of property that it ostensibly criticised.4
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
As far as the liberal order of the nation-state was concerned, its unhappiness
for Iqbal was made possible by the metaphysical division of society into public
and private realms, with the ideal, the spiritual and everything that was not
tied to property being confined to a private life in which it could function
only as ineffective moralism and mere ideal. And it was this specifically meta-
physical division of liberal society into public and private that posed the great-
est danger to the citizen’s life, for it transformed political relations into a set of
instrumental transactions by robbing them of what Iqbal variously called
idealism, conviction or faith, as in the following passage from one of the lec-
tures delivered in 1934 and collected under the title The Reconstruction of
Religious Thought in Islam:
Humanity needs three things today—a spiritual interpretation of the universe, spir-
itual emancipation of the individual, and basic principles of a universal import direct-
ing the evolution of human society on a spiritual basis. Modern Europe has, no doubt,
built idealistic systems on these lines, but experience shows that truth revealed
through pure reason is incapable of bringing that fire of living conviction which
personal revelation alone can bring. This is the reason why pure thought has so little
influenced men, while religion has always elevated individuals, and transformed
whole societies. The idealism of Europe never became a living factor in her life, and
the result is a perverted ego seeking itself through mutually intolerant democracies
whose sole function is to exploit the poor in the interest of the rich. Believe me,
Europe today is the greatest hindrance in the way of man’s ethical advancement.5
Iqbal therefore deplored the liberal state as a soulless system of interests
driven entirely by the greed for ownership, and feared that the formation and
representation of India’s religious groups as interests in its terms would end up
eliminating whatever remained of the ideal or ethical in them, thus giving way
to the malign instrumentality of discursive reason that he saw operating in
imperialism, communism and fascism alike. The extreme gravity of this situa-
tion, in the years leading up the Second World War, is made very clear in the
New Year’s message Iqbal broadcast in January 1938 from the Lahore station
of All-India Radio:
The rulers whose duty it was to protect and cherish those ideals which go to form
a higher humanity, to prevent man’s oppression of man and to elevate the moral
and intellectual level of mankind, have in their hunger for dominion and imperial
possessions, shed the blood of millions and reduced millions to servitude simply in
order to pander to the greed and avarice of their own particular groups. After sub-
jugating and establishing their dominion over weaker peoples, they have robbed
them of their possessions, of their religions, their morals, of their cultural traditions
and their literatures …
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ILLIBERAL ISLAM
As I look back on the year that has passed and as I look at the world in the midst of
the New Year’s rejoicings, it may be Abyssinia or Palestine, Spain or China, the
same misery prevails in every corner of man’s earthly home, and hundreds of thou-
sands of men are being butchered mercilessly. Engines of destruction created by
science are wiping out the great landmarks of man’s cultural achievements.
The world’s thinkers are stricken dumb. Is this going to be the end of all the progress
and evolution of civilization, they ask, that men should destroy one another in
mutual hatred and make human habitation impossible on this earth?6
For all these reasons, great and small, Iqbal celebrated the lack of national
identity in the Indian Empire and approved of the curious forms that the
language of liberalism assumed there, because he thought that India could
develop a new political language of world-historical importance. He had this
to say about India’s exemplary political role in his presidential address to the
Muslim League in December 1930:
India is Asia in miniature. Part of her people have cultural affinities with nations in
the east and part with nations in the middle and west of Asia. If an effective prin-
ciple of co-operation is discovered in India, it will bring peace and mutual good will
to this ancient land which has suffered so long, more because of her situation in
historic space than because of any inherent incapacity of her people. And it will at
the same time solve the entire political problem of Asia.7
Islam occupied a privileged role in this world-historical project, especially
in India, where an infinitely diverse and dispersed Muslim minority allowed
it to become purified of the kind of regional, linguistic, racial or class identity
that might otherwise permit Islam’s representation as a liberal interest. Indeed,
the fact that the Muslims of India constituted a political interest of some sort
despite their diversity and for apparently idealistic motives made them intrac-
table to the propertied order of a liberal state, or so Iqbal seemed to suggest in
his 1930 address to the Muslim League:
It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of
polity—by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system
and animated by a specific ethical ideal—has been the chief formative factor in the
life history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyal-
ties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups and finally transform
them into a well-defined people. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that India is
perhaps the only country in the world where Islam as a society is almost entirely due
to the working of Islam as a culture inspired by a specific ethical ideal.8
For Iqbal, it was the abstract nature of Muslim cohesion that made it into a
concrete force. Islam’s very unreality became the most potent of realities, born
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
72
ILLIBERAL ISLAM
ous process of practically remaking men and furnishing them with a fresh emo-
tional equipment … The formation of the kind of moral consciousness which
constitutes the essence of a nation in Renan’s sense demands a price which the
peoples of India are not prepared to pay.11
It was on the basis of such realities that Iqbal went on to re-think the rela-
tions of social difference in India beyond simply calling for separate elector-
ates, weightage or federation. Indeed, the reality that Iqbal dealt in could only
be approached by a thinking that abandoned the ephemeral and opportunistic
calculations of party politics, which was, in his words, ‘incapable of synthesiz-
ing permanence and change in a higher political concept’ and thus ‘driven to
live from hand to mouth’.12 What kind of thought, then, approached the reali-
ties of Indian politics, as Iqbal saw them, to conceive of social difference out-
side liberal categories? Religion, precisely because it was the one phenomenon
not proving amenable to the liberal imperative of nationalism in India, offered
the only position from which the latter’s order of interest, representation and
contract might be countered.
Much like his contemporary, Gandhi, Iqbal wanted to turn to the advan-
tage of Indian politics the very problem of religion that history had
bequeathed it. Like Gandhi, Iqbal intended to do this by inserting religion
into public life in such a way as to limit the instrumental violence of liberal
politics and make place in it for what he called conviction, idealism or ethical
life. One way of doing this was to continue the colonial system of separate
electorates and weightage, although it forestalled the liberal categories of
nationalism in a merely negative way while at the same time giving rise to
communal acrimony. Another way of approaching the problem (which, let us
be clear, was one not of Muslim or even minority interests, but precisely the
possibility of disinterest in a liberal order) was to work towards a federation
that would allow for the expansion of religion’s ethical or idealistic qualities
in public life. As far as Islam was concerned, Iqbal proposed the following
solution in his 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League:
I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best inter-
est of India and Islam. For India it means security and peace resulting from an
internal balance of power; for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that
Arabian imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilize its law, its education, its
culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with
the spirit of modern times.13
The political bondage of India has been and is a source of infinite misery to the
whole of Asia. It has suppressed the spirit of the East and wholly deprived her of
73
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
that joy of self-expression which once made her the creator of a great and glorious
culture. We have a duty towards India, where we are destined to live and die. We
have a duty towards Asia, especially Muslim Asia. And since 70 millions of Muslims
in a single country constitute a far more valuable asset to Islam than all the coun-
tries of Muslim Asia put together, we must look at the Indian problem not only
from the Muslim point of view but also from the standpoint of the Indian Muslim
as such.14
Just as Gandhi ended up making a compromise with liberalism by relin-
quishing his attempt to keep India within an empire, Iqbal, too, compromised
with the liberal spirit of nationalism by grudgingly acceding to a territorial
form of political order. Iqbal described what this new political order might
look like in his presidential address of 1932 to the All-India Muslim
Conference, situating it in the historical context of nationalist agitation and
religious conservatism in India:
These phenomena, however, are merely premonitions of a coming storm, which is
likely to sweep over the whole of India and the rest of Asia. This is the inevitable
outcome of a wholly political civilization which has looked upon man as a thing
to be exploited and not as a personality to be developed and enlarged by purely
cultural forces. The peoples of Asia are bound to rise against the acquisitive econ-
omy which the West has developed and imposed on the nations of the East. Asia
cannot comprehend modern Western capitalism with its undisciplined individual-
ism. The faith which you represent recognises the worth of the individual, and
disciplines him to give away his all to the service of God and man. Its possibilities
are not yet exhausted. It can still create a new world where the social rank of man
is not determined by his caste or colour, or the amount of dividend he earns, but
by the kind of life he lives; where the poor tax the rich, where human society is
founded not on the equality of stomachs but on the equality of spirits, where an
untouchable can marry the daughter of a king, where private ownership is a trust
and where capital cannot be allowed to accumulate so as to dominate the real
producer of wealth. This superb idealism of your faith, however, needs emancipa-
tion from the medieval fancies of theologians and legists. Spiritually we are living
in a prison house of thoughts and emotions which during the course of centuries
we have woven round ourselves.15
It is important to note here that Iqbal’s solution to India’s religious problem
was intensely patriotic without being in the least nationalist, since its granting
of political power to Muslims was meant to make them more rather than less
modern as well as Indian by ridding their religion of the stamp of Arab impe-
rialism, and even going so far as to give India a world-historical role in the
making of a new Asia. Though a Muslim solution, it was also one that presup-
posed and indeed called for the equal if not greater participation of Hindus
74
ILLIBERAL ISLAM
in its enterprise, for the establishment of Islam in the public life of India auto-
matically brought into being the presence there of Hinduism as well. While
he did not write much on the political role of Hinduism, Iqbal made it abun-
dantly clear that he thought nationalism and its liberal dispensation were if
anything more dangerous for Hindus than they were for Muslims, since ‘the
process of becoming a nation is a kind of travail, and in the case of Hindu
India involves a complete overhauling of her social structure’.16 More than this,
Iqbal was adamant that religious toleration was in fact only true of those who
were themselves Hindus or Muslims. So in an exchange with Jawaharlal
Nehru, after quoting Edward Gibbon’s dismissal of tolerance as an attitude
either of indifference or of weakness, Iqbal writes the following:
It is obvious that these types of tolerance have no ethical value. On the other hand
they unmistakably reveal the spiritual impoverishment of the man who practices
them. True toleration is begotten of intellectual breadth and spiritual expansion. It
is the toleration of the spiritually powerful man who, while jealous of the frontiers
of his own faith, can tolerate and even appreciate all forms of faith other than his
own. Of this type of toleration the true Muslim alone is capable. His own faith is
synthetic and for this reason he can easily find grounds of sympathy and apprecia-
tion in other faiths. Our great Indian poet, Amir Khusro, beautifully brings out the
essence of this type of toleration in the story of the idol-worshipper. After giving an
account of his intense attachment to his idols the poet addresses his Muslim readers
as follows:
Ay ke za but tanah ba Hindu bari
Ham za we amuz parastish gari
[You who condemn the Hindu’s idolatry
Learn from him the ways of worship]
Only a true lover of God can appreciate the value of devotion even though it is
directed to gods in which he himself does not believe.17
Like Gandhi, therefore, Iqbal believed that faith alone could recognise
itself in others and so be taken seriously without being represented and thus
destroyed in a liberal order of interest and contract. While we have been look-
ing thus far at the ways in which Iqbal thought such recognition might be
possible in the historical and political realms, it is in his strictly philosophical
and literary work that this recognition receives its lengthiest analysis. And
much like Gandhi, again, for Iqbal philosophy and literature were important
because they were democratic, being not only themselves part of everyday life
but also dealing each in its own way with the problems of everyday life. This
was of course especially true of Iqbal’s poetry, which enjoyed enormous popu-
larity at all levels of society even in his own day. How, then, did Iqbal reflect
75
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
upon what I have been calling the crisis of representation in the philosophy
and literature of everyday life?
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ILLIBERAL ISLAM
77
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
exclusively Muslim character to his work or, on the contrary, linked it exclu-
sively to European thought. Rejecting both these opinions, Iqbal made the
following remark: ‘It is unfortunate that the history of Muslim thought is so
little known in the West. I wish I had time to write an extensive book on the
subject to show to the Western student of philosophy how philosophic think-
ing makes the whole world kin.’20
The book Iqbal imagined writing was not meant to represent Muslim
thought as something external, but rather to make it available to the West as
thought in a purely internal sense. It was this translation of difference into
thought that made the whole world kin, and it did so by depriving difference
of all its alien particularity, historical and ethnographic, so that it might be
apprehended without the mediation of the Hegelian universal. Thought in
Iqbal’s sense moves beyond an order of representation to one of conversation
since it takes the form of kinship. Indeed, for Iqbal, the universe itself was a
collection of subjects engaged in an infinite conversation—this being the only
way in which it could have meaning for ethical life.21 Philosophy manifestly
acknowledges this kinship by making historically impossible conversations
possible between thinkers from completely different periods and contexts, in
this way relinquishing the representation of their particularities for a transla-
tion into thought.
The conversational nature of philosophical thought directly links it to the
relations of everyday life. For example, Hindus and Muslims could not con-
duct their daily interactions by continuously representing each other in liberal
fashion as Hindus and Muslims, but only by destabilising if not altogether
relinquishing representation and translating their relations into the languages
of commerce or sexuality or friendship, each one presupposing the singularity
rather than equivalence of the parties concerned, and each therefore deferring
the moment of Hegelian universality. For it is the very proximity of the inter-
locutor in conversation that deprives him of visibility and therefore prevents
his being grasped, defined and classed as an interest.22 This closeness makes for
relations between persons that might be philosophically incomplete or unsys-
tematic and socially prejudiced or stereotyped, since without the moment of
universality they exist only partially and as fragments. Such closeness, how-
ever, also makes for a conversation without the visibility of representation, and
one that is both philosophical and mundane. It is this kind of conversation
that characterises Iqbal’s politics of translation.
Having revealed the virtues of liberal representation, including even histori-
cal and sociological particularity, to be abstractions of and impediments to
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ILLIBERAL ISLAM
relations of social proximity, it was left for Iqbal to demonstrate the salience
of his politics of translation. This he did primarily in his poetry, which was and
continues to be enormously popular in the Indian Subcontinent and much
beyond. It is evident that Iqbal made use of the kind of philosophical transla-
tion I have been describing in the many poems where he sets up conversations
among the most disparate historical characters, who are able to relate one to
the other not because they all agree or have the same thoughts, but precisely
because they have been denuded of the historical or sociological particularity
that makes them prey to the universal. And this translation of difference into
thought by no means renders the former less historical; in fact, the opposite is
true. In his epic Persian poem, the Javid Nama (Book of eternity), for
instance, Iqbal has Pharaoh speak to Lord Kitchener, among other curious
combinations, and this not only shows in an almost virtuosic fashion how
historical differences can become kin by being translated into thought, but
also how the very scandal of a conversation between such characters makes the
reader even more aware of their historical differences.
More interesting in some ways than these conversational pieces are those
poems in which Iqbal performs a complete translation of difference, which is
thus apprehended as such without representation and without any exotic
particularity being left over from the process. A poem like ‘Aftab’ (The sun),
from Iqbal’s first collection of Urdu verse, the Bang-e Dara (Call of the cara-
van-bell), translates the Gayatri, a Sanskrit hymn to the sun, in such a way that
without an authorial parenthesis it is impossible to identify it as one. There is
no attempt at capturing what for the Urdu language would be the exotic or
ancient flavour of the original by any peculiar use of syntax or borrowing from
commonly understood Sanskrit vocabulary. Apart from a single poem, ‘Naya
Shivalaya’ (The new temple), from his brief period of infatuation with Indian
nationalism, all of Iqbal’s verse dealing with non-Muslim subjects performs a
complete translation. Among these are the biographical poems ‘Swami Ram
Tirth’, ‘Ram’ and ‘Nanak’, all from Bang-e Dara. Also present in this first Urdu
collection are several untitled poems of a satirical nature in which the Hindu
and Muslim communities are represented by a cow and a camel respectively.
The absurd conversation these beasts conduct in Iqbal’s verses has the effect of
sending up representation itself, as well as its processes of substitution and
equivalence, in an even greater absurdity.
Yet there is still something representative in the very titles given to many of
these poems, which mark them out as ‘Hindu’ or ‘Sikh’ insofar as they are
separated from other poems marked similarly as ‘Muslim’. After his first Urdu
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
collection, then, Iqbal stops partitioning his poetry religiously and puts Hindu
and Muslim terms in much greater proximity. So in the Javid Nama not only
do figures like the Buddha and Bhartrihari appear side by side with Muslim
personalities, but they interact even more invisibly. For example, in the Javid
Nama a narrator moves from planet to planet, seven in all, meeting various
historical and mythical characters. The plan of this work is always compared
both to Dante’s Divine Comedy and to the legend of Muhammad’s ascent
through the seven heavens, the miraj. A more likely model might be Nizami’s
Persian epic, the Haft Paykar or Seven bodies, where a hero is similarly
depicted travelling not from planet to planet so much as from medieval clime
to clime, each under the influence of a particular planet. Iqbal, then, modern-
ises this plot by introducing planetary travel. But this whole genealogy of
influences and models changes when we consider that one of the first figures
Iqbal’s narrator meets, who will be his guide to the planets, is Jahan-Dost or
World-Friend, a literal translation of the Sanskrit Vishvamitra, who was the
spiritual guide of Rama, hero of the epic Ramayana. If Jahan-Dost is, as Iqbal
told some of his friends, the sage Vishvamitra, then the Javid Nama is a kind
of Ramayana, which is also a narrative of search and travel.23
But in what does all this secrecy result? Has it moved past the criticism of
political representation to become just an elaborate literary game? Not quite.
What appears to us as a difficult and elaborate literary game was in fact Iqbal’s
attempt to perform his criticism of representation by writing about Hindus
and Muslims in a completely different yet entirely comprehensible and even
popular way. The role of the Hindu in Iqbal’s writing is of some importance,
so much so that it cannot be detached from that of the Muslim, to which it
relates as thought, the thought of difference as such. The thought of ancient
India, particularly as it is manifested in figures like Krishna (in the Bhagavad
Gita) and the Buddha, Kapila and Bhartrihari, Ramanuja and Shankara,
weaves its way in and out of Iqbal’s philosophical work, even that which deals
explicitly with Islam. But it does so in a very specific way. On the one hand,
there are detailed comparisons between Hindu and Muslim thinkers, for
instance in the introduction of the Asrar-i Khudi, where Iqbal praises Krishna’s
philosophy of action in the Gita and lauds Ramanuja’s commentary on it, but
is highly critical of Shankara’s apparently beautiful but purely theoretical
interpretation. The latter’s enormous and, he thinks, deleterious influence
upon Hinduism Iqbal then compares to the influence of the mystic Ibn Arabi
on the world of Islam. Or there is the following footnote in his doctoral dis-
sertation, ‘The Development of Metaphysics in Persia’, in which the work of
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ILLIBERAL ISLAM
the Muslim thinker Jili is thought together with and made inseparable from
those of a number of Hindu philosophers:
This would seem very much like the idea of the phenomenal Brahma of the
Vedanta. The Personal Creator or the Prajipati of the Vedanta makes the third step
of the Absolute Being or the Noumenal Brahma. Al-Jili seems to admit two kinds
of Brahma—with or without qualities like the Samkara and Badarayana. To him
the process of creation is essentially a lowering of the Absolute Thought, which is
Asat, in so far as it is absolute, and Sat, in so far as it is manifested and hence lim-
ited. Notwithstanding this Absolute Monism, he inclines to a view similar to that
of Ramanuja. He seems to admit the reality of the individual soul and seems to
imply, unlike Samkara, that Iswara and His worship are necessary even after the
attainment of the Higher Knowledge.24
On the other hand, there are comparisons between Hindu and Muslim
thought where the former is seen as being systematic and the latter frag-
mented. Take the following sentences from Iqbal’s introduction to his
dissertation:
The most remarkable feature of the character of the Persian people is their love of
Metaphysical speculation. Yet the inquirer who approaches the extant literature of
Persia expecting to find any comprehensive systems of thought, like those of Kapila
or Kant, will have to turn back disappointed … In fact the Persian is only half-
conscious of Metaphysics as a system of thought; his Brahman brother, on the other
hand, is fully alive to the need of presenting his theory in the form of a thoroughly
reasoned out system. And the result of this mental difference between the two
nations is clear. In the one case we have only partially worked out systems of
thought: in the other case, the awful sublimity of the searching Vedanta.25
Iqbal’s task, then, is to translate Muslim thought into modern language in
a systematic way, as he claims in the introduction to his dissertation: ‘I have
endeavoured to trace the logical continuity of Persian thought, which I have
tried to interpret in the language of modern Philosophy. This, as far as I know,
has not yet been done.’26
And so Muslim thought is modelled upon Hindu thought, although not
without a certain rivalry, as in the following passage from an essay of 1900,
‘The Doctrine of Absolute Unity as Expounded by Abdul Karim al-Jilani’,
published in the Indian Antiquary:
While European scholars have investigated ancient Hindu philosophy with an
unflagging enthusiasm, they have, as a rule, looked upon Muslim Philosophy as
only an unprogressive repetition of Aristotle and Plato … This comparatively indif-
ferent attitude towards Arabic philosophy has been evident, perhaps, ever since the
discovery of Sanskrit literature. We admit the superiority of the Hindu in point of
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
philosophical acumen, yet this admission need not lead us to ignore the intellectual
independence of Muslim thinkers.27
Yet Iqbal, as we might expect, was no lover of the universality of fully
worked out systems, which he frequently criticised, especially with regard to
Indian thought, as being inhuman and uninspiring: ‘Semitic religion is a code
of strict rules of conduct; the Indian Vedanta, on the other hand, is a cold
system of thought.’28
In his essay on Jili, Iqbal tells us why the system as a form of the universal is
necessarily abstract and life-denying:
We know much in theory and our belief in this kind of knowledge depends on the
force of the number of arguments advanced in its support. The detection of some
logical flaw in our argument, or the force of the arguments in favour of the opposite
view, may at once induce us to abandon our theory, but if the ego has ‘realized’ the
theory, if the theory in question has been a spiritual experience on our part, no argu-
ment, however forcible, no logical flaw, can dispose us to abandon our position.29
So we come back to what Iqbal elsewhere calls the ideal, conviction or faith;
something that, while it is very real indeed, cannot be represented in terms of
the universal and the particular. In philosophical language, such conviction
occurs as incomplete or unsystematic thought, and in political language it
occurs as a prejudice or stereotype, neither being dependent on any worked-
out logic. Iqbal tried to explore this conviction both philosophically and
politically, because he thought that it alone made a purely human and egalitar-
ian existence possible as something both singular and common, phenomenally
real and intellectually fragmentary. One of the ways Iqbal conducted his
exploration was by translating the terms Hindu and Muslim philosophically
and looking at the way in which they entered into a conversation. In this case,
the invisible, unrepresented particularity of Muslim conviction was to be
made systematically visible on the universal model of Hindu philosophy, with
which it in fact changed places. Yet this immediately put the Hindu in the
position of the Muslim, since it was Indian thought that then became invisible
in Iqbal’s work. Here, in other words, we have a classic form of Hegelian rever-
sal, with the universal and the particular, or in Iqbal’s language the visible and
the invisible, coming to mediate or rather convert each other, so that Islam
becomes the secret of Hinduism and Hinduism of Islam, without either being
made equivalent to or a substitute for the other, both having being robbed of
all sociological particularity and rendered into metaphysical categories.
The Hindu–Muslim dyad we have been looking at is in fact only one of a
series of couplings, all illustrative of the relations between the visible and invis-
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ILLIBERAL ISLAM
ible, universal and particular. The most important of these pairs in Iqbal’s
work are those formed between men and women, reason and passion, the
material and the spiritual. Given the stylised nature of these dyads (derived
possibly from Nietzsche’s coupling of Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth
of Tragedy, though the influence of Persian and Urdu poetics should not be
underestimated either), it is obvious that they have no sociological reality
because they have been translated completely into thought. The artifice of
representation, therefore, has been as effectively exposed here as it was in
Iqbal’s satirical verse, since these pairs drift one into the other without being
mutually substitutable. As with Hinduism and Islam, then, Iqbal works with
everyday prejudices and stereotypes to build a relationship between the units
of each pair. So women, passion and the spiritual constitute the invisible,
unrepresented or fragmentary parts of social relations whose systematic por-
tions are defined by men, reason and the material world. And it is because the
units of these pairs are not set up as alternatives to one another but are related
as a series of translations that Iqbal can move from one to the other in an
apparently contradictory fashion. He famously pours scorn upon the myster-
ies of Sufism, for instance, accusing it of a retreat from material existence, yet
he continues to use its concepts and language, not least those of secrecy and
mystery. Iqbal similarly criticises the vulgar representation of history in what,
after Henri Bergson, he calls serial time but writes great narrative poems in
which Muslim history is plotted precisely in serial time, for example the cel-
ebrated Shikwa (Complaint) and Jawab-e Shikwa (The complaint’s answer).
The most common way in which scholars have dealt with these apparent
contradictions in Iqbal’s thought is by positing strict divisions between its
early and later periods. So we are told that Iqbal’s early period was character-
ised by an infatuation with Sufism and Indian nationalism, while his later
period tended to be dominated by an anti-mystical and even pan-Islamist
religiosity. My own position is that, while there is, of course, development in
Iqbal’s thinking, its continuities are far more remarkable. The strict division of
Iqbal’s early and later periods is everywhere belied by his writing, so that in a
late work like the Javid Nama we see the very Hindu, Indian and Sufi themes
that were present in an early one like the doctoral dissertation. Moreover,
Iqbal never omitted even his early Indian nationalist poems like ‘Naya
Shivalay’ from the later editions of his work, though he was not averse to
expunging other verses from them.
The appearance of contradiction in Iqbal’s thought is due to the compli-
cated politics of translation he sets up between Hindus and Muslims, men and
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
women, in which no term can be reduced to another, and where each is trans-
lated into a thought well beyond the historical or sociological status of liberal
interest, thus becoming philosophically kin to the other. Is it possible that this
arcane theory of social relations, as well as its literary practice in Iqbal’s poetry,
actually reflected in some way the realities of everyday life in British India? It
might prove instructive in this respect to study the way in which popular
prejudices, then as much as now, also move beyond the historical and socio-
logical terms of liberal interest to operate at least in part amid another politics
of social difference: a politics in which the inevitably fragmentary nature of
prejudice cannot represent either itself or its object as an interest. Perhaps it is
only when such prejudices come systematically to represent both themselves
and their objects as interests that they become politically instrumental, which
is the same thing as saying that they become liberal.
Like his contemporary, Gandhi, Iqbal concerned himself with social rela-
tions that seemed to exist beyond the procedural language of liberalism, which
was made up of terms like interest, representation and contract. While these
relations, and especially religious ones, were seen by nationalists as much as by
imperialists to pose a threat to liberal politics (justifying for the latter at least
the temporary withholding of political responsibility from Indians), neither
Iqbal nor Gandhi saw religious or non-liberal social relations primarily as
threats of this kind. On the contrary, such relations were for them not only
inevitable but also valuable because they prevented the complete dominance
of liberal principles, which both men saw as posing a far greater threat to
humanity than these prejudices. In his own way, then, each man tried to
develop those social relations that liberalism had confined to the realm of
stereotype into a kind of ethical criticism of liberal politics. And given the
nature of religious relations in India, ethical criticism here could by no means
be defined in anaemic European terms as a despairing or nostalgic and in any
case politically inconsequential practice. Indeed, for Iqbal as much as for
Gandhi, the very problem that religion posed for liberalism in India consti-
tuted the latter’s greatest contribution to ethical and political thought.
In an essay of 1909 titled ‘Islam as a Moral and Political Ideal’, and published
in the Hindustan Review, Iqbal wrote the following:
The central proposition which regulates the structure of Islam … is that there is
fear in nature, and the object of Islam is to free man from fear. This view of the
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ILLIBERAL ISLAM
universe indicates also the Islamic view of the metaphysical nature of man. If fear
is the force which dominates man and counteracts his ethical progress, man must
be regarded as a unit of force, an energy, a will, a germ of infinite power, the
gradual unfoldment of which must be the object of all human activity. The essen-
tial nature of man, then, consists in will, not intellect and understanding … Give
man a keen sense of respect for his own personality, let him move fearless and free
in the immensity of God’s earth, and he will respect the personalities of others
and become perfectly virtuous.30
With this quotation, we come back to Iqbal’s criticism of intellect and
understanding, which is so frequently juxtaposed to what he calls faith, con-
viction or idealism. The fear that for Iqbal results in unethical or violent action
is, he suggests, fostered rather than denied by intellect or understanding,
whose uses of representation, whether political or epistemological, end up
strengthening divisions between the human and the non-human, as well as
between human beings themselves. Representation, in other words, depends
upon the epistemological separation of subject and object together with the
political separation of public and private, both of which it intensifies by limit-
ing the bounds of individual and other human action to the purely instrumen-
tal. And these sets of limits, argues Iqbal, rather than confining the destructive
potential of human action, actually expand it by making human beings prey
to fear, especially the fear of what lies outside one’s own place, on the other
side of liberalism’s various separations. Such limits and the fear that attends
them can only be surmounted by removing human action from the operations
of representation that characterise intellect and understanding, both of which
Iqbal thought had adopted a fundamentally passive attitude towards reality
seen in purely external terms.
In trying to exit the language of separations and limits that characterised a
liberal order of representation, epistemological as much as political, Iqbal had
recourse to the notion of will, for which he famously used the abstract Persian
noun khudi (instead of iradah, more commonly used for will, but only as a
quality). Of course, khudi, which had the virtue of doing away with notions
of agency relying upon intellect or understanding, could not itself constitute
some substance that might be represented, as Iqbal explained in an essay expli-
cating his use of the term and distinguishing it from Nietzsche’s:
According to Nietzsche the ‘I’ is a fiction. It is true that looked at from a purely
intellectual point of view this conclusion is inevitable … There is, however, another
point of view, that is to say the point of view of inner experience. From this point
of view the ‘I’ is an indubitable fact … which stares us in the face in spite of our
intellectual analysis of it.31
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Thus metaphysically the word ‘khudi’ is used in the sense of that indescribable
feeling of ‘I’ which forms the basis of the uniqueness of each individual.34
It should be obvious that the universality of liberal representation, which
would make all particulars equivalent and substitutable with each other either
as subjects or as interests is being subverted in the quotation above by a singu-
lar infinity. An expansively horizontal concept of universality, we might say, is
being displaced by an intensively vertical notion of infinity: one with no links
to representation, whether political or epistemological. Having (at least in his
work) extracted Indians from a liberal order in which they existed as subjects
by being represented as equivalent and substitutable particularities, Iqbal is
here extracting them from another form of this order, where the subject rep-
resents others in the same way as it is represented. And it is to will or khudi
that this work of extraction is entrusted.
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ILLIBERAL ISLAM
Iqbal’s life work may well be seen as an effort to think outside or at the
edges of liberal categories like interest, contract and representation, not neces-
sarily in order to destroy their malign visibility but to take into account the
invisible social relations that these left out. I have argued here that Iqbal tried
to move beyond such categories by rethinking relations among Indians (I have
focused in this essay on Hindus and Muslims) in terms that were simultane-
ously philosophical and popular, these terms being linked, I am suggesting, to
prejudice and stereotype as intractable and finally ethical qualities. Not only
did Iqbal move away from conceiving of India’s religious groups as sociological
particularities and therefore as interests; he distanced himself from liberal
ideas of the epistemological and political subject as well, by rethinking the
notion of will phenomenologically, as an occurrence without substance,
khudi, which he also linked to the realities of everyday life.
Just as Hindus and Muslims are transformed by Iqbal into metaphysical
rather than sociological categories, relating to one another in metaphors of
translation instead of representation, so the Indian subject is transformed by
him into a phenomenological will, which acts by breaching all the separations
and limits of a liberal order based on intellect or understanding. Indeed, it is
this will that performs the final ceremonies of translation as a social practice,
its task being not to observe limits and respect differences, but to destroy their
externality in translation as an act of creative absorption, for as Iqbal puts it:
To permit the visible to shape the invisible to seek what is scientifically called
adjustment with nature is to recognize her mastery over the spirit of man. Power
comes from resisting her stimuli, and not from exposing ourselves to their action.
Resistance of what is with a view to create what ought to be, is health and life. All
else is decay and death. Both God and man live by perpetual creation.35
Iqbal comes back in this passage to the visible and invisible relations of
social life, recommending the destruction of external reality by its translation
into the inner life of the will. The close similarity this idea bears to that cele-
brated section in Hegel’s Phenomenology on the dialectic of master and bonds-
man is probably not accidental, and Iqbal discusses its implications over and
over again. So he decries the master’s merely ideal command over external
objects through the instrumental action of his bondsman and glorifies the
latter’s manipulation and ultimate destruction of all externality including that
of the master. Iqbal calls this external world that must be destroyed an idol,
thus making use of a Muslim stereotype to indicate the fetishistic quality that
externality assumes in everyday life. As in Hegel’s dialectic, the negation of
such externality then makes it a part of inner life, which is where it partakes
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88
DEBATES
4
POSTCOLONIAL PROPHETS
Neguin Yavari
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
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POSTCOLONIAL PROPHETS
features. According to Bruce Lawrence, the term was coined ‘to pluralize
identities and collapse borders’.9 Christopher Bayly describes Hodgson’s
approach as marked by a redemptive turn of mind, and tinged with religious
sentiments.10 According to Bayly, Hodgson believed that the contemporary
humiliations of the Islamic world could be redeemed by finding and empha-
sising those aspects of its religion and culture that had once put it at the pole
of human achievement. Fiercely opposed to the Eurocentrism that prevailed
in the mid-twentieth-century academy, Hodgson sought to valorise the
Islamic world by amplifying its past accomplishments. To further undermine
the triumphalist European narrative of progress and growth, Hodgson
accused the West of having fallen victim to ‘technicalism’, and, at least implic-
itly, prescribed as its antidote ‘spiritual fulfilment’ (in abundance in Sufi cir-
cles, for instance).
Such scholarship aims to reveal the hidden agendas and conceptual pitfalls
in arguments put forth by Islam’s detractors. Their differences notwithstand-
ing, neither the apologists nor the detractors have moved beyond what is in
essence a culturalist explanation that rests on capturing the conceptual ambit
of Islam. Hence, a methodologically rigorous explanation for the ‘rise’ of
Europe or the ‘fall’ of the Islamic remains a desideratum, and the stubborn
lingering of that elephant in the room continues to undergird every theoreti-
cal foray into modern Islamic history.11 Before further exploring the imperme-
ability of Islam—epistemologically as well as politically—and the scholarship
defending Islam, a brief history is in order.
Although Western academic study of Islam is several centuries old, the field
was redefined in the 1950s with the emergence of area studies centres, depart-
ments and institutes.12 Despite a significant increase in resources—such cen-
tres were primarily underwritten by various agencies of the US government—
regional institutes and area studies departments have largely failed in the task
of developing an intellectual vision, methodologically rigorous scholarship,
and in influencing public opinion and policy debates on the Islamic world. In
a well-known article entitled ‘The Study of Middle East Politics 1946–1996:
A Stocktaking’, James Bill delivered a bleak verdict: ‘we have learned disturb-
ingly little after fifty years of heavy exertion’.13
Timothy Mitchell has similarly addressed the failure of area studies to
advance learning.14 Against the conventional history, which places the forma-
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94
POSTCOLONIAL PROPHETS
and the United Nations—in other words, the countries responsible for the
creation of the new Jewish state plus the collective international community—
had an obligation to ensure its survival.’20
In the United States, ideological screening and funding from sources with
non-academic interests kept the lid on academic criticism of Israel and US
policy in the Middle East in the 1950s and the 1960s. Over the years the US
government, in addition to numerous other soft-intervention projects, has
funded a slew of propaganda outlets to craft a receptive audience for Western
policy objectives, affects, styles and cultural products.21 Most of these were
authorised and undertaken in secret. Tawfiq Sayyigh’s Al-Hiwar journal, pub-
lished in Beirut, ceased publication in 1967,22 after CIA funding of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (established by the CIA in Paris, which also
funded the British magazine Encounter, founded in 1953 by Stephen Spender
and Irving Kristol) was revealed. In addition to winning the academy’s silence
on the Arab–Israeli conflict, encouraging the study of minorities—religious,
ethnic and racial—was another objective dictated by government monies.
CIA funding for Encounter, for example, ‘carried with it one stipulation: that
the journal publish articles dealing with the position of Muslim communities
in the Soviet Union.’23
Public lectures that raise awareness of human rights violations, as well as
oppressive and discriminatory practices towards religious, ethnic and gender
groups, are a regular occurrence in such programmes.24 More recently, it was
thanks to Wikileaks that US government efforts to undermine political stabil-
ity in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East were publicised. The revelations
were particularly damaging to the University of Durham, whose exchange
programmes were exposed as a cover for attracting Iranian graduate students,
researchers and faculty members out of Iran.25 Ironically, Durham had also
been implicated, just a few years earlier, in another funding scandal, on that
occasion involving funding from hard-line and staunchly reactionary clerics
and research institutes in Iran.26
In the post-Said academy, however, a general shift in political proclivity
away from government interests is palpable, especially in area studies pro-
grammes.27 This shift is most pronounced in current research on Israel, if not
on the study of repressed populations. But the failure of the academy to have
influenced public debate or policymaking runs deeper than the divergence
between the worldviews and inclination of politicians, and those upheld by
the professoriate.
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
The remarks above suggest that the study of Islam in the liberal academy is
mired in unresolved contradictions and paradoxes because it brings to the fore
fissures in the liberal world order, and by extension, in the academy itself. The
academy can do no more than point to the ideological biases that prevail in its
immediate political context.28 But it is unable to extricate itself from that
liberal order; here liberalism is considered in a rather pedestrian manner, as
the constitutive ideology of the West.29 The act of highlighting the gap
between claims and practices of empires professing a civilising mission is at
least a few centuries old. The Melians protesting Athenian imperial ambitions
by pointing to the discrepancy between what the Athenians saw fit for them-
selves and what they did to nations in Thucydides’ The History of the
Peloponnesian War is a well-known example, as is the case presented by
Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar in the service of the Spanish crown.
Penned in the mid-sixteenth century, de las Casas’s painstaking account of the
contradictions between the words and deeds of Spanish officials in the
Americas, could, with nominal modification, be resurrected to indict the
conquest of Iraq by the US-led coalition in the first decade of the twenty-first
century. The Spanish crown claimed to propagate civilisation and Christian
ethics. Coalition forces evangelised democracy and human rights.
None of this is new. The role of liberalism as the ideology of European
empires has been recognised for the past half-century at least,30 and as the
ideology of capitalism a little more recently. As pointed out by Thucydides in
the fifth century BCE and de las Casas in the mid-sixteenth, a hallmark of
imperial history is the discrepancy between words and actions. Dipesh
Chakrabarty, for example, has noted that in the nineteenth century, Europe
simultaneously preached its Enlightenment humanism to the colonised and
denied its practice.31 Critics of the imperialist project, however, adopted that
same array of Enlightenment values. That contradiction is difficult to over-
come, he adds, ‘because there is no easy way of dispensing with these values in
the condition of political modernity. Without them, there would be no social
science that addresses issues of modern social justice.’32 Similarly, Abdelfattah
Kilito’s thoughtful L’auteur et ses doubles, published in 1985, questioned the
promise of translation and other modes of transcultural exchange.33 And in
the same vein, Zaheer Kazmi has pointed to the failure of advocates of Muslim
liberalism ‘to exit its language or categories’, irrespective of whether they ‘seek
to synthesize, adapt to, or critique Western liberalism’.34
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POSTCOLONIAL PROPHETS
The travails of postcolonial theory and the mixed reception it has received
in the academy is also emblematic of political dissonance on another plane.38
The Second World War and the dismantling of the colonial order redefined
nations and states in significant ways. While international orders of govern-
ance were introduced, physical borders between states were strengthened for
a variety of purposes, including curbing immigration to the West.39 That the
promise of liberalism is neither international nor universal was quickly evi-
dent, as was the undeniable monopoly of Western educational institutions on
the production of knowledge. Accordingly, the critique of American imperial-
ism and Western prejudice shifted from the third world to the heart of the
Western world itself, and subsequently subsumed the quintessential taxonomy
of liberalism, that is, identity politics, especially focused on the issue of gen-
der.40 Whereas, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of a
universal West unbound to categories of race or religion, as well as historical
context, was dominant in Asia, out of which anti-Western visions of world
order were born in the early twentieth century, as Cemil Aydin has docu-
mented,41 the past few decades have hardly seen an intellectual or discursive
tradition of anti-Westernism arise among the non-Western secular intelligent-
sia.42 That too must be a part of the ‘universalisation’ of knowledge—and of
power—that Mitchell wrote about. This spatial turn is striking in the case of
Middle East and Islamic studies. While the writings of Jalal Al Ahmad,43
Hicham Djait,44 Abdullah ‘Arawi,45 Samir Amin,46 and Frantz Fanon were the
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POSTCOLONIAL PROPHETS
Dialogue and conviviality between East and West is a central theme in The
Impossible State. Published more than half a century after Hodgson’s works,
it amplifies his attempt to absolve the Islamic world from accusations of
backwardness by pointing to the moral desertification of Western societies;
the culprit in this case, however, is the post-Enlightenment state rather than
technology. Hallaq’s prescription for his Western audience includes undoing
the ravages of the modern state, which has, so he claims, brought incremen-
tal solitude, alienation, suffering, environmental degradation and violence
to its inhabitants.
Islamists, on the other hand, are plagued by a hopeless quest for an Islamic
avatar of this very modern state, which, ‘by any standard definition of what
the modern state represents, is both an impossibility and a contradiction in
terms’.53 The modern state is an affront to Muslim morality, because it
represents a process of becoming, the unfolding of a novel and particular political
and politicocultural arrangement that is distinctly European in origin … Europe,
defined in geographical and human terms, was the near exclusive laboratory in
which the state was first created and later developed, and Euro-America remains
until today the location of the paradigmatic state.54
On that basis, Hallaq issues to the Muslims a call to revive the true shari‘a,
the pure, unadulterated shari‘a of precolonial times, the sine qua non of which
is abandoning the 200-year-old quest for an Islamic state. Pointing to the
distorted shari‘a that is on parade in the contemporary Islamic world, Hallaq
suggests that we ‘overlook the modern Islamic experience with the Sharī‘a’, and
focus instead on ‘what the Sharī‘a meant for Muslims throughout the twelve
centuries before the colonialist [sic] period, when it existed as a paradigmatic
phenomenon’.55 The technicalities involved in understanding what the shari‘a
signified to the millions of Muslims of the past notwithstanding, the shari‘a
that Hallaq upholds was, of course, never the ethos of governance in the
Islamic world. Where the shari‘a prevailed, as a metaphysical entity with mate-
rial efficacy, is, to Hallaq, outside of history. It was a ‘hegemonic moral system’
that ‘did its best to address the mess of social reality’.56 As a paradigm, ‘like its
particular and technical legal rules’, it ‘always strove toward the realization of
this moral end, sometimes failing but most often succeeding, which is pre-
cisely what made it a paradigm’.57 As proof for the validity of his assertion that
history can have a lingering presence without necessitating a return to the
past, Hallaq maintains that, if Westerners can invoke Aristotle, Aquinas and
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POSTCOLONIAL PROPHETS
contends, calls for the meaning ascribed to religion to be revisited. In fact, the
tortuous relationship between religion and ideology—which marks a vast
swath of the academy’s quest for an authentic and useful description of
Islam—‘may be obsolete, and even irrelevant’. For it is possible to consider
both religion and ideology ‘as suspended by myth operating in the intellectual
and political sphere’.63 But the fascination with the moderate Muslim, the
liberal Muslim, the rational Muslim and the democratic Muslim proceeds
unabated.64 In this vein, as well, is best explained the politics of the generous
funding of centres charged with propagating true Islam and promoting
Muslim–Christian understanding in various Western universities by a number
of Saudi donors, in whose own backyard, Christians, as well as all non-Sunnis,
are branded as heterodox and considered barely human.65
Politics is organised on a wholly different grid in the Islamic world itself. The
political purchase of Khomeini’s frontal attack on the separation of public and
private in post-revolutionary Iran becomes apparent when it is considered as
part of a larger project fostering political community, and of a collective ethos
that is neither sectarian nor Western.66 In the early 1980s, when Iran was los-
ing a substantial number of its scientists, professionals and academics to emi-
gration, the government decided against closing the borders. The departure of
a good portion of its disgruntled, vocal elite helped in withstanding Saddam
Hussein’s military attack, funded by the Saudis and supplied by Western pow-
ers including the Soviet Union. By making participation in the Islamic public
contingent upon lifestyle, Khomeini strove to erase that very hybridity that
Edward Said so embraced and fixed at the heart of the secular critique. When
asked about a fresh-from-Harvard PhD as someone to head the Ministry of
Economics in the early days of the revolution, Khomeini is famously reported
to have said, ‘Economics is for donkeys. Give me a pious performer of the
namaz [ritual prayers].’67 That distinction was essential to the forging of a new
nationalism and a new politics. That point, too, was lost on his erstwhile inter-
lopers in the West.
The fallout from a conflicted notion of the political is also germane to the
failure of area studies to advance knowledge of the Islamic world. In the first
instance, the ideological stance of a sizeable share of scholars who study the
modern Islamic world remains ‘crypto-normative’, to use Peter Gordon’s
ascription.68 Amr Hamzawy has shown that a good number of studies pro-
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POSTCOLONIAL PROPHETS
alternative reading of the tea leaves. In an interview in July 2012, when the
‘insurgency’ in Syria was almost a year old, the mullah prophesised that,
should Bashar Assad stay in power for another six months, he would stay
there for good.76 How much did ‘we’ expend to learn that? Ali Akbar
Mohtashamipur, among Khomeini’s closest allies, and Iran’s ambassador to
Syria in the 1980s, who has taken up residence in Najaf after the election
crisis in 2009, neither condones nor condemns Assad’s regime; nor does he
claim to have a resolution for Syria’s ills. It is a simple political understanding:
the Ikhwan in Syria, and elsewhere in the Arab world, he begins, resemble
al-Qaeda: they are radical, dogmatic and Salafi in their views. Even Ayman
al-Zawahiri appears as more temperate. Further, the Syrian opposition is
desperately fractured, and the strongest bloc, the Ikhwan, is mistrusted by the
Americans.77 Simply put, the coalition against Assad is not a political force.
Muhtashimipur’s analysis also explains the genesis of al-Da‘ish (ISIS) as a
splinter group within the so-called Syrian insurgency that broke away in
2013. The allegedly ‘popular uprising’ in Syria began in March 2011. Three
years on at the time of writing, with an insurgency forged and funded by
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE and cheered on especially by the French, the
former colonial masters of al-Sham, one wonders if the ‘popular’ in ‘popular
Syrian uprising’ is appropriate at all, outside the imagination of so-called
freedom lovers worldwide.
I would like to end with a suggestion: the end of liberal Islam came from
the Islamic world itself. And there will be no return to a Mu‘tazili paradise, as
Van Ess has argued,78 or to the mystical shar‘ism of Ghazzali as Hallaq has
claimed. Like ideologies of all stripes, Islam has and will continue to evolve
conceptually, as it will in taking the experts by ‘surprise’. As long as ‘we’ refuse
to deign Islam worthy of a political reading, ‘we’ will not understand the con-
text that generates and is shaped by those conceptual evolutions.
103
5
Abdennour Bidar
This chapter argues that a new spiritual era, beyond the conventional forms of
established religion, is upon us. While such an era exists as a yet unmapped
consequence of modernity, it also moves us beyond the widely held belief that
the Islamic world faces a ‘liberal’ political challenge. In fact, the contours of
this new era and the challenges that define it are less political than metaphysi-
cal. After two centuries centred on Western-led calls for greater ‘secularism’, a
new, post-religious era is beginning that is equally as concerned with progress
in the fields of justice, peace and equality. However, this era is marked not by
the questions of liberal political philosophy that have increasingly under-
pinned critical debate on the nature of contemporary Islam, but by a far
deeper question facing mankind—its spiritual and historical destiny.
* * *
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A powerful argument about the ‘exit from religion’ concerns ‘the death of
God’ as prophesised by Friedrich Nietzsche. Another was developed in the
work of the celebrated Indian poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal who
considered his work as a response to Nietzsche. Following Iqbal’s line of
thought, my own work has moved in the direction of a ‘de-Westernisation’ of
the theory of an ‘exit from religion’. In so doing, I have sought to depart from
Western liberalism, a philosophy based on the Enlightenment premise that
human beings are able to build political societies and a moral order solely on
the basis of natural reason and thus without any supernatural inspiration. The
Nietzschean idea of the ‘death of God’ is the most symbolic expression of this
ontological and existential claim, namely that humanity considers itself to
have been liberated from the control and help of gods. However, in Iqbal’s
view, liberation from the guardianship of God does not mean there is no
longer any relationship between god and humanity. Contrary to Ludwig
Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity, 1841), who claims that the religious
have projected their fantasies of immortality, wisdom, omnipotence and
omniscience on to gods, Iqbal argues that these supposed fantasies are in fact
an anticipation of our future condition. Gods are not formed from our fanta-
sies but from our own future. Thus, when Iqbal talks about a ‘metaphysical
liberalism’, he is referring to the intuition of the future, characterised by the
next step in our spiritual evolution: a step where the human species is liberated
from the vision of a divine form as something different from itself, and has
instead liberated itself in this divine form. In this sense, the ‘exit from religion’
is not the end of the complex and mysterious relationship between humanity
and its gods, but the beginning of a dialectical process of integrating God into
humanity. Accordingly, Iqbal’s ideas have the potential to serve as a crucial
tool for understanding liberalism and secularisation not only as a political
process but also as a spiritual re-birth for humankind.
Iqbal’s approach situates humankind’s engagement with modernity beyond
a Western secular framework, instead defining this engagement as a spiritual
event that I call ‘a new deal between mankind and its Gods’. This idea is based
on Iqbal’s works, for whom the ‘exit from religion’ is the moment in history
when man becomes ‘the heir of God’; in other words, it signals the moment
when humanity expresses a degree of creative power similar or even equal to
that which religions had attributed to their gods. Thus if something like the
exit from religion must take place for humanity, it will not be by way of ‘the
death of God’ but via inheriting divinity.
Humanity is now in a state of crisis because it is all-powerful. Since the end
of the nineteenth century, the human species has amassed a colossal amount of
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power in its hands. Nature and life itself are increasingly at the mercy of our
new technical and scientific powers. This is the true dimension of what we call
‘liberalism’: it is not only about democracy, political rights and freedom of
expression but also the accumulation of technical and scientific power. And for
so long as this continues to go unrecognised, the liberalism of the West will
continue to exist in a state of ignorance with regard to its true nature, and its
expansion to other civilisations will remain problematic, particularly so in the
case of Islam, which, as Iqbal claims, is based on the belief that man has to
become the heir of God. As such, there will not be an Islamic liberalism until
humanity becomes aware of God’s inheritance. Viewed in this way, the prob-
lem of liberalism in Islam is not principally about the separation between state
and religion or secularisation: whereas Christianity, with its theory of two
kingdoms—‘my kingdom is not of this world’ ( John 18:36)—helped to estab-
lish the basis of liberalism’s claim to liberate humanity from the control of gods,
the contribution of Islam to liberalism will come on another level: the revela-
tion or the awareness of divine power as the final destination of humanity.
But how will this work in practice? Can the possession of divine power be
used for anything other than destructive ends? Civilisation itself is currently
facing a vast range of threats, from rising social inequality to environmental
degradation because of the scientific and technical power we have accrued,
which has become destructive because we have been unable to control it. In
Islamic theology, Allah is called the Creator (hāliq), the one who gives life
(muhī) and gives death (mumīt) as he is a merciful (rahmān) and fair (‘adl) god.
When Allah gives death, it is not the consequence of an uncontrolled power.
At present, we resemble young gods, drunk on our immense power. This is why
we need a new anthropology—a new anthropology for a new era in which we
have accrued immense power—one that can be symbolically expressed by the
idea of a new deal between mankind and its gods: we should turn to these
divinities one last time, no longer to bow to them but to ask how to express this
level of power creatively. How, then, are we to become their worthy heirs?
Can humanity end its course of individuation1 to self-knowledge and self-
realisation by the ultimate experience of oneself as a creator at the level of
activity and power contained in the concept of God? Iqbal was the first
Islamic thinker to accept the Western proposition that something essential has
changed in the relationship between mankind and its gods—other Muslim
thinkers preferring to hold to the conventional view that ‘god is God’ and
‘man is a creature of God’—but he was also one of the only Islamic thinkers to
have criticised the Western interpretation of this changing relationship. This
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constitutes the heart, the principal motive, of his critique of Western moder-
nity. It is impossible to describe his thought as either ‘oriental’ or ‘occidental’
because he tried to understand the retraction of God against the ‘oriental’
persistent conviction that god(s) will always remain above humankind in a
position of ontological superiority. What the West has tended to view as the
end of human spiritual ‘dreams’ or ‘illusions’ was in fact the unveiling of our
real spiritual and historical destiny—the ‘emergence in man’ of a creative and
powerful nature—the art and mystery of which has been preserved in the
concept of God.
The Western exit from religion has failed to conceptualise the emergence
of man at a superior level of existence who accrues powers traditionally
reserved to God. For many thinkers in the West, the retreat of God signifies
the end of all hope of ‘transcendence’. Gianni Vattimo is explicit on the col-
lateral damage caused by the death of God for humankind, emphasising that
‘humanism is at a critical stage because God is dead: that is to say that the very
substance of the humanist crisis, is this death of God, as announced in a non
fortuitous way by Nietzsche, who is also the first radical non humanist thinker
of our time’.2 His argument, as applied to Martin Heidegger, runs as follows:
the writing which inaugurated the contemporary conscience to the humanist crisis,
namely the letter of Heidegger Über den Humanismus (1946), describes humanism
in completely other terms, and highlights his very close connection to onto-theol-
ogy which characterises the whole of Western metaphysics. Here, humanism is very
precisely synonymous with metaphysics: in the sense that it is only in the perspec-
tive of a metaphysician (as a general theory of Being being something) that man
may find a definition on which it may be possible for him to construct himself,
educate himself.3
The humanist theme of the fulfilment of man is thus destroyed by the
death of God. Yet, at the same time, the negation of the divine as an illusion
denies the greatness of man fashioned on the greatness of God. When the
model of divinity collapses, the whole ladder of ontological and existential
progress also crumbles.
By allowing us to imagine the retreat of God in a sense other than a death,
Iqbal saves the possibility of humanism. He saves the oldest intuition of man-
kind about itself: the ability to transcend its condition on earth as represented
by the ontological status of a creature. God does not die; he comes towards
man, he becomes man.
Such an approach also has consequences outside of Islam, for it puts Iqbal
and Islamic thought at the centre of a debate between interpretations of what
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Of Allah, Iqbal writes that ‘in order to emphasise the individuality of the
Ultimate Ego [that is, God] the Koran gives Him the name of Allah’.6 From
Iqbal’s perspective, it would be more correct to say that humankind ought to
aim at ‘the individuality of the Ultimate Ego’ than to say that it should aim at
its ‘divinisation’ or ‘deification’.
This leads us to a better understanding of the hypothesis underlying Iqbal’s
philosophy of history, because the individuation of man is expressed not only
as the spiritual itinerary of certain people—the mystics or Sufis to whom he is
referring—but in the broader meaning of humanity’s possible and desirable
destiny. Here, Iqbal comes very close to the ideas of Henri Bergson, who does
not speak of human beings as a set of individual atoms, nor of the human
condition as having an immutable nature, but registers the individual into
society.7 According to Bergson, the itinerary of each individual is set within
the course of a humanity that always progresses towards greater creative free-
dom: all of ‘humanity, in space and in time, is an immense army which gallops
at the side of each one of us, ahead of and behind us, within a moving charge/
mass capable of knocking over all resistance and to overcome all obstacles,
perhaps even death’.8 Iqbal represents history in a similar way: man ought to
believe in history as a process of the progressive auto-revelation of potentially
infinite and invulnerable human power. We should thus see history, and aim
to live in it personally and collectively, as the realisation of the potential ges-
tating in our human ego—and hence to arrive at the conclusion that ‘Heaven
and Hell are states, not places/localities.’9
Iqbal’s ideas disrupt traditional religious eschatology: he effects a true delo-
calisation of hell and paradise, of the metaphysical sky as opposed to the fragile
world, and a true transfer of the theme of the posthumous transformation of
being to the concrete temporality of the past, the present and the future. He
makes hell the symbol of all those lives in which man had not kept any con-
scious relationship with his final destiny as a creative power. Hell is not other
people, nor a cursed beyond, but the here and now when the ‘I’ does not find
in the human world any support for individuation10 to render it more creative.
According to Iqbal, contemporary man’s ego lives in an infernal world because
it is enclosed within the narrowest limits of its basic individuality—without
‘reliance’ on or ‘alliance’ with the deeper dimensions of his ‘self ’, and so without
any chance to attain the salvation resulting from a work of superior individua-
tion. Iqbal refers to this existential descent into the most inferior and narrow
basis of the ‘self ’ as ‘the painful realisation of one’s failure as a man’.11
Conversely, ‘Heaven is the joy of triumph over the forces of disintegration.’12
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
beyond imagined by the religious no longer needs to exist. The human ego
arrives at this point in its own spiritual growth because it does not have any
need to imagine a metaphysical beyond. The genius of Iqbal vis-à-vis modern
Western thinkers is that his substitution of the metaphysical beyond does not
devalue human ambition. This is the major difference between what Iqbal
finds in Islam and ‘Western modernity’, some of whose major thinkers (nota-
bly Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the three famous maîtres du soupçon) have
denounced religious experience as an illusion, and denied what they consider
the illusion of man exceeding his (earthly) condition. Man without the
beyond is not reduced to his ordinary ‘me’ or ‘self ’; quite the opposite, for he
will find a spiritual ecosystem in the sensible universe that ought to allow him
to exceed his ancient limits naturally. Is Islam, then, a kind of post-religion
proposing the first spiritual way to worldly salvation?
According to Iqbal, the Qur’an regards as sacred that which has always been
considered as profane: the here below (dounia), and the destiny of man. The
religious beyond could thus have been a mere primitive allegory of our worldly
and spiritual evolution. Religions and myths have furnished us with many
descriptions of a metaphysical beyond that can be seen as a series of prepara-
tory images with the aim of impelling us towards what we will one day be able
to envisage directly as the sensible, historical future of a superior individua-
tion. In other words, these images have acted as imaginary anticipations of our
future. They were true or efficient as erotic stimuli (because they are desirable)
or as conscious intuitions produced by what Carl Gustav Jung called the col-
lective unconscious (Iqbal was a great reader of Jung).
Man’s ontological progress towards his proper Creative Self must take place in
this world because the ascendant evolution of the ‘I’ towards the Ultimate
Creative Self is the cardinal expression of the general movement of life. What
we call ‘liberalism’ is only one of the stages on the path to this liberation of the
Ultimate Creative Self. According to Iqbal, the ascension of man towards the
summit of his actualisation is incorporated in the heart of the ascension of the
entire universe towards the production of this Ultimate Ego. The result of
humanity’s creativity will thus be the crowning of the ascending and creative
process that will animate the entirety of being, in which Iqbal sees the ‘law of
the universe’. According to this view, man fulfils the perfection of the universe;
humankind directs and completes the universe’s itinerary. As stated, for
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
to do so today? After all, there does not seem to be any reason why science
should avoid recognising the universal progress of life, given humanity’s knowl-
edge of the complexity of the most highly evolved organisms. In the words of
Emmanuel Kant, science could at least act as if (heuristic principle) universal life
was attracted by and aiming for its own completion.
Progress does not signify teleology; it does not imply that there is any divine
intention or intelligent design in the march of history.21 It is possible to con-
sider with Iqbal that something like the thought ‘I am’ has been searching for
itself since the beginning of the universe, but first in an unconscious and blind
fashion, then groping and uncertain, eventually more and more efficient, until
becoming the consciousness of man. There was no conscious intention, there-
fore, at the beginning of universal progress, nor during the millions of years
preceding the appearance of humanity as a species. It was only with the appear-
ance of humankind that this teleological dimension of universal progress
would emerge—with the birth of the human species, the improvement of the
universe towards the production of an ever-stronger individuality would
assume the nature of a project. As Bergson states, ‘one will be wrong to consider
humanity as we see it now, as pre-programmed in the evolutionary movement’;
however, at the same time, ‘we consider humanity as [the] reason (raison d’être)
of evolution’22 because evolution finds in man the consciousness of a self that
was lacking before. As a result, it is from this human adventure that evolution
acquires a retrospective intelligibility, a coherent direction in which it appears
to progress. It is from the human being’s point of view, Bergson continues, that
‘the entire organised world becomes like the humus on which either man or a
being which resembles him morally, ought to grow’.23
Has science spent a sufficient amount of time reflecting on the difference
between these two postulates, of one finality that has been present from the
beginning of evolution, and Iqbal’s conception of a finality that appears in man
and is the product of his orderly understanding of reality? As Bergson writes,
‘Everything happens as if24 an indecisive and vague and undecided being, which
one could call, as one likes, man or superman, has striven to realise/accomplish
himself.’25 Thus, in this Kantian sense of ‘as if ’, at least, there does not seem to be
any reason why evolution cannot be understood as progress.
The universal progress of life serves as the background against which the
career of the human ego unfolds. The spiritual future of man is not played out
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in heaven, but on earth. Iqbal thus turns the future into a new dimension of
humanity’s transcendental hopes, since he awaits in the future the answers to
prayers or answers that our ancestors awaited beyond the limits of this world.
But the fundamental difference between Iqbal and modern Western thinkers
who conjugate faith in the future and resignation in finiteness (finitude)—like
Albert Camus who said that ‘the future is the only transcendence of man
without God’26—is his vision of this future as a place where man will find a
kind of infiniteness (infinitude) and be joyful in full expression of himself, of
his possibilities and highest aspirations.
But, then, who was Iqbal if not some kind of sphinx? The metaphor of an
Iqbalian sphinx is founded on a double analogy with the fabulous animal that
Oedipus came across:27 on the one hand, the Sphinx questions Oedipus on
man; on the other, Oedipus will be allowed to follow his path on condition
that he can answer his question—in other words, he symbolises those questions
that man (and mankind) tries to unravel on the crossroads of existence. This
Greek Sphinx is the mythological being who poses a riddle to such a man about
man as such—and the answer has the potential to open the doors to the future.
Such is the case with Iqbal: not only does he interrogate us, we the sons of the
moderns, on the supreme vocation of man, but his interrogation reminds us
that our future depends on whether our answer is right or wrong—given that
the civilisation we are constructing will be determined in our image of our-
selves. Indeed, like all human civilisations, our civilisation ought to be founded
on the humanist vision of man and for man—in other words, civilisation
should be founded on a philosophy of existence with a spiritual dimension.28
One of the virtues of Iqbal’s work is that it invites us to pose the question
of the superior image of man that ought to be at the heart of all civilisations.
What kind of human being do we wish to construct? It is not enough to
declare an ‘era of the individual’ and to place this individual at the centre of
the world simply to allow them to better accomplish their desires, or to receive
social and political rights. This form of materialist and sociopolitical liberal-
ism is insufficient. The humanism of Western modernity does not go far
enough to be a complete humanism—which Christian thinker Jacques
Maritain rightly calls an ‘integral humanism’,29 a higher form of humanism
that enables human beings not only to exist in comfort but also to pursue a
spiritual career beyond the limits of their individual egos. Existence is about
more than satisfying our ambitions and attaining the rights to exercise our
individuality. While we have aspirations for our present ego, we also have
aspirations for the Creative Self that sleeps in us, awaiting the means to reveal
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itself: whereas the former only concerns the level of individuation at which we
find ourselves, the second, which our present human civilisation almost com-
pletely ignores, concerns a later stage of individuation. In Iqbal’s perspective,
there is even a third possibility, namely the aspirations of the revealed
Ultimate Ego, relative to his (super)nature as a Creative Self, and of which a
distant intuition is carried by the aspirations for the present ‘I’ or ‘self ’.
The trivialities of our present times too often lead us to forget that we can
have aspirations for the ‘I’ beyond the present ‘I’. Societies have fixed their eyes
exclusively on aspirations of profit and consumption. Modern societies are
based on a certain form of economic organisation, in which human behaviour
is understood via a purely instrumental rationality (based on expectations of
behaviour). But as Iqbal reminds us, there is also the concomitant necessity of
an axiological rationality (based on the idea of a behaviour’s inherent value),
which leads us towards existential purposes of a most elevated degree. In pro-
posing that this subject aims at the Ultimate Ego/Creative Self, the most trou-
bling factor of our time is the grave error of believing that humanity can be
directed purely by economists, capitalists and technocrats, or by political and
atheistic humanist views that completely ignore the idea that the dignity of
humanity is not founded on the rights of our ordinary ego but on the higher
rights of our spiritual ego—the rights of the Ultimate Ego/Creative Self.
Among Western thinkers, critiques of modernity, and of liberalism by those
who promote human rights, remain confined to the political and the eco-
nomic. Cornelius Castoriadis, for example, has argued that the major illusion
of contemporary civilisation is its pretence ‘that the technical-economical
categories were always determining … but buried under mystifying appear-
ances—political, religious or other—and that capitalism, by de-mystifying or
by disenchanting the world, allowed us to see the real significances’.30 Marshall
Sahlins is clear in this regard that the two major ideologies of the contempo-
rary world—Marxism and liberalism—are guilty of the same error in postulat-
ing that man is above all a homo economicus.31 But ‘the productive forces’ of
property (riches and tools) to which this homo economicus dedicates himself
are not ‘the fundamental motivations of man … in all societies’.32 There are also
what may be called the productive forces of ‘humanisation’, that is to say ener-
gies and aims dedicated to man’s development of the highest abilities of
human nature.
As Castoriadis points out, this process of humaniation concerns the role of
‘productive or creative imagination’, or of ‘radical imagination’,33 whereby a
human group gives unto itself the fundamental representation of an existential
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The most common prejudice of our era is that humanity is already complete—
a prejudice shared by believers and unbelievers alike. As soon as this prejudice
emerged, the idea of an enquiry into humanity’s superior possibilities seemed
redundant. Similarly, the menace of ‘post-humanism’, which claims that
humankind is the past and that we should prepare for the advent of ‘cyborgs’
or ‘augmented humans’, suggests that there is little point in thinking of
humanity beyond its present limits. Yet these fantasies about replacing
humanity with something else can be revealed for what they are by a renewed
spiritual reflection on the ‘evolutionary reserves’ and abilities that man may
have in himself. This raises a real ethical imperative because it involves our
existence as a species. To discover or conceptualise a later stage of humanisa-
tion—of which Iqbal hands us the image with his pedagogy of individuation
towards a Creative Self—will thus provide a way to oppose the arguments of
those who invoke the idea of post-humanity: if we show that we are not an
outdated species, but constantly evolving and therefore capable of crossing
thresholds in the realisation of ourselves, the discourse of our replacement by
the post-human may be seen as detrimental to our dignity on the grounds that
it threatens to interrupt our development.
Have we attained the summit of our evolution biologically and spiritually?
This type of question is almost totally absent in French philosophical discus-
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
sions, doubtless because of the spectre of eugenics, for one does not want to
see the effect of a will to power giving way to the morally inadmissible tempta-
tion of wanting to create a ‘race of super men’. However, it is vital that we
reflect on humankind’s future, given that we live in a world dominated by a
techno-science that is already beginning to conceive the man–machine cou-
pling in such a way that there is an after-man that seems to await us. Thus,
unless we are able to conceive of a future humanity that uses these scientific
and technical developments to augment the nature of humankind, these new
additions will work against us.
The vast literature based on the post-human paradigm, particularly in the
United States, poses an unprecedented challenge for humanist thought.35
Without going so far as to talk about a programme of ‘defending man’, it is
vital that we invoke thinkers like Iqbal in order to resume the effort to deter-
mine the future direction of humanity. But a simple reminder of the dignity
and grandeur of our human condition is not sufficient to save us.
It is necessary to do more, to think far beyond. That is the possibility
offered by the riddle of the Sphinx. It first obstructs the way ahead, but as soon
as the enigma has been resolved, it immediately opens a new path forward. As
it happens, and for all the reasons mentioned above, human civilisation will
not escape this question of the Iqbalian Sphinx on the future of man.
As is the case with the Oedipal Sphinx, the way in which Iqbal formulates his
question contains the necessary clues to reply to it. However, his theory of the
ego—the nature and process of individuation—requires more explanation.
Singh speaks of it as a ‘philosophy of Egohood’, a ‘philosophy of egoity’.36 Iqbal
believes that both our historical and our present degree of individuation
amounts to a very incomplete experience, knowledge and enjoyment of our
ego—because for him, there is a very important step between what we call
(and live as) ego and the true Ego—the human/divine experience of the
Creative Self. Our present ‘ego’ is only—like in Plato’s cavern—the shadow of
the full ‘I-amness’ (égoïté in French). What we experience as our ‘I’ is only a
primitive, partial, superficial experience of the ‘I’: the ego that we are, which
we perceive and conceptualise, is not the complete ego or our total individual-
ity, but only the embryo. It is important to use this image of the embryo, and
to extend the metaphor to its gestation, if we wish to understand the direction
of this individuation: it is by reflection upon that which already characterises
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
imposing our thinking on the real—to branding Being with the seal of our
interiority, as Georg W.F. Hegel claimed.39 This identity of vocation and
capacity between the symbolic machine and the physical machine is expressed
in the double meaning of the French verb ‘saisir’, which means to understand
and to take hold of, to grab. ‘Saisir’ corresponds to the actualisation of power
in order to define the being of something, either in deciding its sense, or in
deciding its use. Whatever he thinks or whatever he does, it is man who by
thought, language and hands takes command of Being, and then creates the
world as representation, meaning and use, who creates the symbolic and physi-
cal tools by which he recreated or remade the world in increasingly radical
proportions over thousands of years. This last point also seems to lend reason
to Iqbal’s thinking: for if we may consider the extension of our ‘creative I’ as
the most plausible future of our individuation, it is not only because this crea-
tive faculty already characterised us but equally because, in an observable
fashion, it has historically become ever more powerful—and never exhausted.
It is, of course, not necessarily the case that the civilisations that lived in
harmony with nature40 were inferior to our modern and contemporary soci-
ety; they could even be viewed as superior, depending on how much impor-
tance we place on valuing, respecting and conserving nature. As Claude
Levi-Strauss points out, it is impossible to progress on all levels at the same
time: ‘That which we win in one, we are always open to lose in another.’41 This
is also true of the progress of human civilisation, as demonstrated by the fact
that human creativity exploded during the period when we ravaged nature for
our own needs.
From the point of view of humanity’s history, it is clear that this increase in
creative power is the zenith of our process of individuation. Iqbal presents the
progress of creative capacity as the less speculative direction of our evolution
because it will be in continuity with that which has always characterised us:
‘In his intimate being, man, as conceived in the Qur’an, is a creative activity, a
spirit that ascends and, in its march forward, elevates itself from one state to
another.’42 I call this the Iqbalian cogito: not ‘I think, therefore I am’ (as René
Descartes said) but ‘I create therefore I am’—the strength/reality of my
‘Iamness’ depends on the strength and reality of my creative power. Here,
Iqbal quotes the Qur’an: ‘It is useless that I assess by the redness of the setting
sun and by the night which envelops it, and by the moon when it is full that
you will definitely be transferred from one state to another [my emphasis].’ Here
is the clue that gives us the Iqbalian Sphinx: if there is an individuality beyond
the actual mode in which we are experiencing it, then we should seek to attain
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this via developing of the power of this creative resource; that is why Iqbal
names ‘the Ultimate Ego’ as ‘the Creative Self ’.
The concept of the ego has traditionally possessed a negative connotation, but
Iqbal employs it indiscriminately, as well as synonymously in English with the
notion of self, as well as with that of the Persian hūdī. Javed Majeed explains
this notion as follows:
The transgressive nature of Iqbal’s notion of hūdī is signalled by the term itself.
Annemarie Schimmel has stressed that the word has high connotations in Persian,
implying selfishness and egotism. The standard Persian–English dictionary by
Steingass defines the term as meaning ‘selfishness, conceit, egotism’. The term thus
carries a transgressive charge, which is maintained by Iqbal in his English prose
works. Throughout The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Iqbal uses the
term ‘ego’ to render the Persian term hūdī. Reinterpreting the Qur’an, Iqbal argues
that ‘it is with the irreplaceable singleness of his individuality that the finite ego will
approach the infinite ego …’
As can be seen from this quotation, Iqbal applies his master language of
individual selfhood to God, who is also described variously as an ‘ego’, so that
the transgressive charge of the word hūdī is in play in his conception of God
as well.43 Schimmel wrote in this sense that the book:
Asrāri hūdī [Secrets of the self, 1915] were a shock therapy for almost all of Iqbal’s
friends and admirers. One must think of the highly negative significance in Persian
of the word Khûdî, Self, with its implications of selfishness, egotism and similar
objectionable meanings. Iqbal gives this word a new meaning as Self, Personality,
Ego in an absolutely positive meaning. But still, deepest dismay was caused by his
new ideas; brought up since centuries with the idea of seeing in the Self something
which has to be annihilated in the Divine Essence, the mystically inclined Indian
Muslims could not easily accept a philosophy that taught them to watch over the
growth of their personality, to strengthen it, instead of melting away in the highest
bliss of union with the Only.44
Iqbal, who created or re-created the concept of ego, is thus a philosopher, in
the same sense as understood by Gilles Deleuze and Nietzsche before him:
philosophy is not simply about contemplating the world, but engaging in a
creative activity. More precisely, ‘philosophy is the art of shaping, of inventing,
of manufacturing objects … the “substance” of Aristotle, “cogito” of Descartes,
“monad” of Leibniz, “condition” of Kant, “power” of Schelling’45 and therefore
the ‘Ego’ or more exactly ‘Creative Self ’ of Iqbal. On this subject, Deleuze
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higher existential and ontological level? Is it not this that Nietzsche has des-
ignated ‘erroneous dogmatism on the subject of the ego?’49 Is it not this sense
of the conquest/formation of an ulterior level of egoisation for which he tried
to retrieve inspiration in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, across the process of the
‘three metamorphoses’? ‘It is the three metamorphoses of the spirit that I
name for you: how does the spirit become a camel, and the lion the camel and,
to finish, the baby the lion?’50
The Iqbalian proposal of a Creative Self wants to warn our critical mind
against this assimilation of the ‘I’ of the spontaneous experience of the self
into the totality of the experience of the Ego. When he met one of his spiritual
models, the Sufi HHallāg g during the celestial voyage he imagines in the Javid
124
6
Armando Salvatore
One of the most resistant threads of liberal Islamic thought has been its lim-
ited capacity to emancipate itself from the European political mythology and
theology that has set the benchmarks for the notions of statehood and citizen-
ship in Westphalian and post-Westphalian colonial and postcolonial nation-
states. I am not concerned here with the intellectual limitations of individual
thinkers, opting instead to re-examine the categories of Western sociological
reflection as they deal with the political concerns of postcolonial reconstruc-
tion. The re-imagination of Islam as religion and/or civilisation has played a
role in this process, with Muslim reformers (liberal or otherwise) often
squeezed between a hegemonic European discourse and the imperatives of
anti-colonial struggles. These struggles have often worked to provide reductive
renderings of the plurality, complexity and richness of Islamic traditions.
Modernisation theories, so vituperated in recent decades, originated during
a high point for the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s and were path-
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126
DISSONANT POLITICS IN SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM
Turner also published, in the same year as Edward Said’s Orientalism,4 the
often neglected book Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978).5 Through
these two volumes from the 1970s he showed how a more attentive considera-
tion of the Marxian heritage in Max Weber, who is otherwise considered a
liberal thinker, might have bypassed the limitations of the critique of oriental-
ism and of the re-Islamisation paradigm. I rephrase the question here as one
concerning the extent to which an Islamic modernity (including capitalism)
might have emerged apart from both the anti-colonial wave of critique and
from the culturalist, largely puritan reflex of Muslim reformers’ mimicking
Weber’s famous (or infamous) Protestant ethic thesis.6 This argues that the
origins of European capitalism resulted from Calvinists’ turning the theologi-
cal tenets of predestination into incentives for a life under the aegis of an
innerwordly type of asceticism favouring a strongly profit-oriented type of
capitalistic entrepreneurship. One would misunderstand Weber’s thesis, how-
ever, if we did not connect it to his wider argument on the genesis of moder-
nity, which he identified with a process of rationalisation of sheer power,
becoming autonomous from religious and cultural traditions.
While building his critically neo-Weberian argument on modernity, Turner
stressed the interesting fact that modern Muslim reformers espoused a flat
reading of the Protestant Ethic Thesis, linking religious reform with moderni-
sation, and in this way disproved the complexity of Weber’s argument on the
relation between religious traditions and modern rationality that cannot be
easily caged within a liberal view. Indeed, many contemporary Muslim reform-
ers (often celebrated in the West for their ‘liberal’ outlook) cannot exit such a
Weberist straitjacket. Turner’s preliminary work on the sociology of Islam
acquired a strong relevance throughout the 1980s, a decade that witnessed
serious interpretive contentions (often through the opaque prism of re-Islam-
isation) on the nature of the relations between religion, society and politics in
Muslim contexts. The dissertation I started in 1990 that led to the publication
of my Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity in 1997 also originated
from those contentions.7
This was also when I began to explore the notion of the public sphere as
potentially less contentious and more accommodative of the conceptual inde-
terminacies left behind by the academic fashions of the 1990s, which wit-
nessed a revival of ‘civil society’. The notion of the public sphere, despite the
hegemony of its liberal Habermasian form,8 is more easily contestable and
adaptable than the rigid conceptual apparatus of modernisation theory, the
simplified toolkit of re-Islamisation, and the dogmatic certainties of civil soci-
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DISSONANT POLITICS IN SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM
alternative to this emphasis, and as a way to feed into a more sustained analysis
of the presuppositions and consequences of liberal modernity, I would like to
focus on key intersections between two strands of enquiry and theoretical
reconstruction: a historical sociology that focuses on the long-term trajectory
of the social nexus associated with Islam as a moral and spiritual idiom (what
Marshall Hodgson called ‘Islamdom’), on one hand;11 and the somewhat
a-moral and also less-than-spiritual, yet largely holistic cement of how indi-
vidual self-formation fits into the social bond and generates it, on the other—
what Norbert Elias called the manners and codes originating from the
self-restraint of the ‘civilising process’. This process resonates interestingly,
albeit sometimes oddly, with Islamic notions about the cultivation of person-
ality and character formation.12
While the latter factors are usually attributed to a machine of self-recon-
struction associated with the modern state, modern capitalism, and, at the
intersection of both, modern liberal civil society, Islamic trajectories, as
evidenced by historical sociology, appear, as I will try to show, as the provid-
ers of elements of circulation of social forms and normative codes that can-
not be easily squeezed into those modern formations, while not constituting
their negation either. These Islamic norms and codes interfaced with other
realms and cultures, and often provided a source of socio-political constel-
lations that at times were beneficial to developing original forms of personal
and collective autonomy. This is clearly apparent in the Islam–Islamdom
doublet proposed by Hodgson, and which we will revisit, whereby Islam
represented the engine of inner piety and Islamdom its social nexus. This
scheme visibly contrasts with the systematic sacredness of Western modern
institutions (as reflected in the corporate armature of the Leviathan) for
being both unfitting to modern Weberian rationality and potentially ahead
of it in a world prefiguring patterns of circulation of ideas and images tran-
scending national borders.
In my argument, I will comment upon Hodgson’s approach to the history
of Islam by reference to the emerging field of the sociology of Islam (which,
by necessity, is largely a historical sociology, at least at its inception), and con-
nect it to notions of civility originating from a critical reassessment of the
Eliasian heritage. I will also enrich this double thinking by reference to a more
general idea of circulation as originating from the historical study of the inter-
action among religious and civilisational traditions in a wider Asian realm
than the one directly invested by Islam’s expansion in history.
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Seen from western Europe and its final colonial and imperial triumph during
the nineteenth century, the Islamic ecumene had for long represented a more
advanced civilisational realm. In the early modern era, this ecumene was still
perceived in Europe as a threatening enemy, most immediately in the shape of
the Ottoman Empire. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as
Western Europe, but also Russia, gradually managed to gain the upper hand
against the Islamic ecumene, the West also came into closer contact with India
and China. Such encounters posed new challenges in terms of cultural com-
parison and civilisational interaction than the relation to the Islamic ecumene
had ever been capable of raising. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, China and
India took the place of distinctive and necessary stages on the road to a full
accomplishment of the triumph of reason in human history. As a result, and
despite the attention given to Islam by other thinkers of the Enlightenment
and Romanticism, Islamic civilisation started to look more like an anomalous
sideshow, the outcome of an accumulation of deficits and delays in the road of
human civilisation.
What does sociology have to do with these developments? One key trait of
sociology is its rise, particularly at the turn of the twentieth century, as a schol-
arly reflection on modernity and its processes, and therefore as the discipline
not only enquiring into, but also reflecting upon modern society and its gen-
esis, which clearly included a colonial dimension. While sociology is charac-
terised by such a focus on modernity, often bordering on a self-referential
obsession, it also entails, in its more reflective mode, a questioning of the
Western monopoly on the definition of modernity. Here, Islam plays a quite
crucial, though often understated role, for representing motives and features
of alterity vis-à-vis Western modernity, which can play out both positively and
negatively. This occurred, for instance, within the German political-intellec-
tual scene on the axis linking the philosopher Nietzsche and the sociologist
Weber at a particularly crucial stage in the intellectual genesis of Western
sociology.13 While Nietzsche radically denied the possibility of an objective
reality independent from the knowing subject’s perspective, Weber translated
this painful intuition into potential parameters to measure the Western man’s
universal ambitions against the backdrop of a much larger universe, indeed a
multiverse, of religious and civilisational trajectories. Therefore, the fact that
a peculiar combination of religious and civilisational essentialism, functional-
ism and reductionism became so central to Western postulates of modernity
throughout the genesis of the social sciences in the longer nineteenth century
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DISSONANT POLITICS IN SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM
was undermined from within almost from the beginning. The development
and institutionalisation of the academic study of Islam and the rise of Islamic
studies throughout Europe were integral to this ambivalent development.14
Thus, social scientists who were leading their fields between the second half
of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, like Émile
Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Marcel Mauss (and, we might add,
going further back, Karl Marx, though he was not a sociologist in a conven-
tional sense), passionately engaged with religion. They located religion both
at the beginning and at the end of human development, through a wide bow
stretching from ancient cosmological cultures and communal life to secular
civic life and the modern social division of labour. There was a wider consen-
sus that, far from erasing religion, the need of modern societies for organic
solidarity and charismatic leadership facilitated appropriations of the force of
religion in new forms. Particularly appealing was the form that has been often
defined as ‘civil religion’, having its origin in the thought of the eighteenth-
century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The modern fate of religion
appeared to be less its disappearance than its metamorphosis into a key ingre-
dient of civility or, in Durkheimian vocabulary, ‘civic morals’. The quintes-
sentially secular, modern manifestation of religion is accordingly less its
disappearance than its capacity to nurture civility.
Within this background, Islam has constituted, since the rise of sociology,
a powerful counter-model representing a potential of resistance, both in his-
tory and the present, to this Western matrix of modernity that postulates an
increasingly differentiated role for religion as a provider of sense and moral
cohesion. Islam featured centrally in this trajectory due to its purported
unsuitability for being incorporated in a comparative scheme of ‘world reli-
gions’ on a par with Christianity and Buddhism. In her masterly book, enti-
tled The Invention of World Religions (2005), Tomoko Masuzawa shows the
role that the conceptualisations of Buddhism and Islam, respectively, had in
this construction of the very idea of ‘world religion’.15 She prefaces her inves-
tigation by remarking that the suppression of the feeling of uneasiness and
unsettledness that still affected the European educated classes of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries when they looked at Asia needed to be tamed
and normalised during the nineteenth century in order to allow Europe to
exercise its full colonial hegemony and make this appear as natural and neces-
sary (that is, embedded in the course of history), and even providential. There
was, however, one basic difference in the outlook of Islam and Buddhism that
crystallised in the course of the century. Islam was constructed as consistently
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
monolithic, without easily passing the test of being a ‘world religion’, the cat-
egory that happened to define the emerging academic field of comparative
religious studies. Buddhism was also conceived, like Islam, as a religion with a
clear-cut name and precise doctrinal boundaries, something that neither
European scholars in earlier epochs nor practitioners over the ages had ever
dared to do.
This approach responded to an essentialist attitude developed over the
nineteenth century not just by the scholars of religion, but by the educated
classes themselves, and that neatly reflected the European colonial experience,
which required conceiving of religions and civilisations in terms of larger and
essentially coherent units. Here, essentialism is on the side of the cultivated
and the refined. Yet while Islam was not a big puzzle to European learned men
and societies, Buddhism largely was, so that the essentialisation of Buddhism
became an even more sophisticated enterprise than that of Islam. Most strik-
ingly, the origin of ‘true’ Buddhism was considered the preserve of scholars,
while its historical and contemporary ramifications were downgraded to a
matter of interest for missionaries, travellers and casual observers. This devel-
opment led some scholars to discover a deep, essential affinity between pur-
portedly true Buddhism and allegedly true Christianity, via an emphasis on
the cultivation of the inner self. This development reflected the fact that the
benchmark of true religion was Protestant Christianity, and was based on the
idea of the primacy of the charisma of the founder of a religion and and/or of
its sacred texts (‘scriptures’). Buddhism thus earned the mark of a world reli-
gion. Its alleged universality resided in it having redressed and reformed what
European orientalists saw as the ethnically and nationally, but also priestly and
hierarchically oriented Hinduism, and by strengthening the emphasis on the
centrality of the individual.
While Buddhism was thus accepted as a world religion on a par with
Christianity, this was considered problematic for Islam, which was seen as
particularistic and ethnic. This outcome was part of the rising anti-Semitic
and pro-Aryan bias of the era, something that was to have a devastating impact
on Europe going into the twentieth century, and is still reflected in contem-
porary perceptions of Islam. This lopsided judgement gained currency despite
the historical evidence of the transnational and even transcivilisational import
of Islam over longer time spans and regions. Clearly, this differentiated view
of Buddhism and Islam was also a reflex of the need to reposition both
Christianity and secularism in the context of the modern, global and colonial
hegemony of Europe.
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DISSONANT POLITICS IN SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM
more than ‘reform’. It targets both individual Muslim subjects and the umma
as a whole. Hereby, the word umma itself became at the same time increas-
ingly flexible, often designating the national community, and increasingly
reified, no longer denoting a transterritorial ‘ecumene’ as in the pre-colonial
period. We should bear in mind that by the time the Muslim reformist dis-
course started to be formulated by personalities who were often both thinkers
and activists, the Western diagnosis of the inherent deficits of Islamic tradi-
tions was already gaining currency.
Muslim reformers faced the arduous task of constructing a shared cultural
perspective and promoting a self-sustaining political determination adequate
to challenge their Western colonialist counterparts on their own terrain, while
relying on what they saw as key elements of strength preserved from their own
intellectual traditions and institutional legacies. Yet at the same time, they
forcefully inherited, through an increasingly colonial dependence, the
European dichotomy of religion and civilisation and the European tension of
inner versus public religion. Apart from the crude realities of colonial, politi-
cal and economic dependence, this reformist path never gained the recogni-
tion of the West, not even by scholars—until the irresistible ascent of a
Muslim Western discourse of participation and citizenship after 9/11, epito-
mised by the trajectory of the global public intellectual Tariq Ramadan.21
After the turn to the twentieth century, two world wars, the slow agony of
direct colonialism and the new transatlantic efflorescence of the social sci-
ences, most notably sociology and anthropology (starting this time from the
shores of the new global hegemon, the United States), a new attempt was
made to normalise religion’s role in the public sphere on a global scale.
Particularly important within this trajectory was the work of a leading
Austrian sociologist who migrated to the United States after the Second
World War, Peter Berger, who, building on phenomenology, theorised the
importance of religion for keeping together and providing meaning for a sub-
ject immersed in the life world. Ultimately, the civil significance of religion
originates in its role as a subjective search for meaning moderately exposed to
intersubjective understanding and communication.22
Yet Berger—here followed by Thomas Luckmann23—constructed an
anachronism in providing a transhistorical definition of religion largely stem-
ming from a remoulded use of the word, which crystallised in the 1950s and
early 1960s, in particular in the United States, during a period of breath-taking
modernisation and intense cultural change increasingly conducted under the
banner of individualisation. Overall, if the triumphant notion of religion
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The approach of Marshall Hodgson, who in his career interacted closely with
scholars of world history and modernisation theory, is particularly valuable
when seeking to subvert and revise teleological assumptions about why Islamic
civilisation finally succumbed to the hegemonic power of the West. He looked
through a theoretically informed prism at the distinctively Islamic approach
to building patterns of life conduct and sociability in connection with highly
variable and often flexible institutions of governance. Hodgson suggested ways
in which these institutions needed to be analysed as articulating, in original
and malleable ways, the civilisational equation of knowledge and power via
interactions not only between various sectors of the elite but also between
‘commoners’ and elites across urban, agrarian and nomadic milieus.27
Long before Edward Said, Hodgson was keen to show the extent to which
the scholarly categorisations related to Islam came to depend upon the con-
ceptual hegemony of Western modernity. In this sense, he contributed to
showing, without indulging in any deconstructionist and anti-essentialist zeal,
how even the apparently innocent categories of ‘religion’ and ‘civilisation’
required re-examination. Moreover, he recognised that the Islamic ecumene
was clearly not an example of a neatly overlapping macro-region and civilisa-
tion, like Western Europe/Christendom, China or India. Islam was not
imposed on the Nile-to-Oxus region by conquerors coming in from the
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regional periphery, but was the outcome of complex developments and inno-
vations converging in an original synthesis. Before the advent of Islam, the
region was a configuration of heterogeneous religions and cultures with a long
history of interaction and conflict. Nonetheless, several key aspects of the new
developmental pattern that culminated in the rise of Islam had been in the
making over several centuries. The Nile-to-Oxus area was the birthplace of the
most important archaic civilisations, whose succession and overlapping did
not, however, crystallise into a pattern of regional homogeneity and transre-
gional diffusion.
Yet alongside imperial formations, the region had witnessed the rise of
monotheistic traditions—in different Semitic and Iranic shapes—as well as
the growing strength of urban, mercantile classes, and the egalitarian social
ethics that drew support from both of these trends. Therefore, Hodgson could
argue that it was the Islamicate civilisation that for the first time achieved the
cultural unification of that part of the world, and it did so through a new
elaboration of the monotheistic themes inherited from Iranic and Semitic
sources. It provided them with a new trans-civilisational reach by investing its
expansive orientation into the depths of the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere or ‘the
Old World’. Islamdom (a term popularised by Hodgson) quickly became the
hub of a composite ecumene that reached its zenith of power and knowledge
at the end of the epoch that Hodgson called the ‘Middle Periods’ (tenth to
fifteenth centuries), which orientalists before (but partly also after) Hodgson
have mainly depicted as a phase of decadence and lack of creativity following
the ‘golden age’ of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates.
Hodgson was quite straightforward in seeing the combined heritage gath-
ered and valorised by Islam as centred on an ‘egalitarian cosmopolitanism’: or,
if this sounds too idealistic, on an appropriate combination of largely egalitar-
ian contractualism and a fairly high degree of social mobility, especially if
compared with the bordering civilisations of Western Europe, China and India.
The incomplete transformation of the Nile-to-Oxus region into something
that looks like a clear-cut civilisation provides the background to Hodgson’s
interpretation of Islam as doubling up into a highly translocal and transregional
Islamdom. The civilisational patterns that served to integrate the region (legal,
artistic, multilingual, intellectual and ‘spiritual’) also manifested a hemisphere-
wide, both expansive and integrative, to some extent even entropic dynamics
that has no parallel in premodern history. Islam is a notable exception for not
configuring a civilisational block marked by solid continuities of lettered and
religious traditions since after the Axial Age, the formative era that constituted
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DISSONANT POLITICS IN SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM
the onset of transcendence-based teachings around the middle of the first mil-
lennium BCE.28 Islam rather represents a discontinuous and open civilisational
pattern or process that, by virtue exactly of this higher degree of openness,
produced the only civilisation with a global reach, and as such a civilisation sui
generis, something more like a trans-civilisational ecumene.29
One of Islam’s most striking features over the longer term was its integrative
engagement with a variety of local cultural forms and religious cults, an inte-
gration performed through the working of two types of high culture, a shari‘a-
based culture and knowledge of the jurists (‘ilm) and an adab-oriented court
culture. Hodgson describes the shari‘a-based culture as ‘piety-minded’, yet
suitable to regulate multiple aspects of social life and also to aid in the recon-
stitution of various types of popular religiosity and integrate them within a
coherent institutional framework. Similarly, the cosmopolitan courtly culture
(adab), which was originally reconstructed at the centre of the Abbasid
Empire on the basis of the Persian Sasanian model, fostered literary culture
and ideals of all-round cultivation. Adab provided a civilisational complement
more than a counterweight to the patterns that coalesced around hadith (the
certified sayings of Muhammad), fiqh (jurisprudence) and Qurʾanic scholar-
ship, since adab often also drew on them.
According to Hodgson, the only possible way to understand Islam is from
the standpoint of world history. One should indeed take charge of what is
specific to Islam and Muslim actors vis-à-vis the parameters of Western-
centred modernity without preventively seeking shelter behind an anti-essen-
tialist shield. If pushed too hard, anti-essentialism brings us back to square
one: an absolutisation of stale Western parameters of political, economic and
cultural modernity. Therefore, a sociology of Islam treasuring Hodgson’s
teachings cannot limit itself to looking at modern and contemporary develop-
ments, but should also pay attention to the memory of how Islam reassembled
and gave an unprecedented impetus to the heritage of a number of civilisa-
tional components. Hodgson’s approach is important for the sociology of
Islam since it entails a sustained criticism of the provincialism of Western
orientalist views. These views have historically privileged Islam’s Arabian ori-
gin and often its Mediterranean significance, to the detriment of the intense
and multileveled cross-cultural borrowings with other civilisational realms on
the Afro-Eurasian map.
Hodgson knew Weber all too well, including the fact that Weber, in his
rather thin dealing with Islam, had not only got basic facts about its origin and
development wrong but that he had also raised lopsided questions about it,
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
since Islam and Islamdom did not fit his approach to contrasting Western
rational puritan asceticism with purportedly Eastern mystical paths.30 Bryan
Turner first criticised Hodgson for reducing Islam to inner faith and con-
science. Yet, in more recent writings, the British sociologist has rehabilitated
Hodgson for having been able to show, for the first time and in vivid terms,
Islam’s original cosmopolitan imagination as rooted not in military imperial-
ism but in an inclusive and socially constructive type of piety. In this way,
Hodgson, a committed Quaker, exposed, in the name of a pacifist ethics, the
admixture of Western historic provincialism and colonial arrogance in missing
the way in which Islam (supposedly a ‘religion’) smoothly turned into
Islamdom, a social nexus and civilisational matrix manifest in networks of
local and translocal connectedness and their attendant normative patterns.31
For Hodgson, Islam was an excellent example for the wider argument that
a civilisational process originating from a prophetic call needs a cumulative
religious tradition on which to rely. This is necessary to promote specific ideals
of life conduct and ensure that the ‘high’, lettered traditions of cultural elites
are not disconnected from more popular practices. We can see such ideals at
work in the type of urban piety that characterised the broader Irano-Semitic
civilisational area. This was the cradle of an urban egalitarian social ethics that
also worked as a platform of societal self-regulation and organisation (includ-
ing trans-tribal arrangements). Hodgson was keen to demonstrate, contra
Weber, that Islam’s expansion, particularly during the half millennium that
Hodgson called the Middle Periods, was not only just partly related to mili-
tary conquest but was also the outcome of a highly original process of trans-
formation. Sufi brotherhoods epitomised Islam’s networking momentum, and
propelled the underlying, inertial force of social self-organisation well served
by locally adapted shari‘a practices. This process helped create enduring pat-
terns of group cohesion and intergroup connectedness that were never com-
pletely eclipsed and are reflected in the way Sufism is globally deployed (also
through labour-related migration) in the contemporary world. This circula-
tory momentum comes close to representing the quintessentially social char-
acteristics of the long-term expansiveness of patterns of life conduct inspired
by Islam’s combination of a moral idiom with spiritual paths and patterns of
sociability. The emergent type of civility not exclusively centred on city life, as
it occurred in the Late Middle Ages within Western Christendom, was most
famously evidenced, once more, by Weber’s theorisation of the unique nature
of European urban associations and municipal institutions.32
In referring to Islam as a circulation-based transcivilisational ecumene and
global multiverse rather than as a self-centred universal challenger of Western
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
dynamics. At the same time, this new type of state imposed on them the cir-
culation of the prestige of its own model (most notably during the colonial
and postcolonial eras), whose embracement became the condition, for post-
colonial states, for becoming part of the international system—the ‘interna-
tional’ being at large a surrogate of the circulatory. Such modern frameworks
favoured—also but not only in the case of Islam (as famously propounded by
Ernest Gellner, who also intended to contribute to an interdisciplinary-ori-
ented sociology of Islam, interfacing with anthropology and history)34—the
mobilisation of traditional types of virtuosos or, more often, of specific groups
claiming a pure interpretation of a faith tradition, often also by virtue of their
not belonging to the religious establishment. This phenomenon is usually
understood and categorised as the dynamics of modern ‘fundamentalism’, but
is also, and quite inevitably, an essential part of the genealogy of modern
Muslim reform, as suggested above.35 These were common tendencies in sev-
eral parts of the early modern world well beyond Europe, including the cen-
tralising Muslim empires (the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mughal).
However, it cannot be denied that Reformation and post-Reformation Europe
effected an unprecedented hardening of the notion of religion itself as a con-
fined field of human behaviour out of the inherent richness (and, to some
extent, messiness) of the deployment of transcendence-based traditions of
pious conduct and compassion that originated from the Axial Age onwards.
It was through the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (up
to the European Wars of Religion) that religion became a sphere increasingly
differentiated from the realm of public order presided over by the sovereign
ruler. The main agent of this traumatic development, the Westphalian state (the
Leviathan), attempted to subdue the radicalism of the early modern (often
puritan, proto-fundamentalist) religious movements and put an end to the
unstable late-medieval balance of spiritual and temporal powers. In this
Westphalian regime, which the entire global modern world has inherited in
various ways, religion is well circumscribed, controlled by the sovereign, and its
function can be flexibly shifted back and forth between the religion of the ruler
and the religion of the subject, between the public realm and the inner sphere.
Religious enthusiasm and creativity resurfaced in ever new forms in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially outside Europe, most notably
within European settler colonies. On the other hand, also thanks to the emer-
gence of a print-based public sphere almost everywhere by the nineteenth
century, the unity of faith, now commonly standardised as ‘belief ’, was often
accompanied by the matching standardisation of the vernacular. Starting with
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DISSONANT POLITICS IN SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM
England, where after all the idea of the Leviathan had first been shaped, the
use of English as the liturgical language played an important role in the crea-
tion of a confessional identity. Such passions were directed equally against
religious minorities within as against enemies outside the state. But the impor-
tance of such modern European developments should not distract us from
emphasising the deep changes taking place elsewhere, precisely at the time
when European societies were encountering the outside world in an unprec-
edented way through colonial enterprises. The consequence of the process was
to set the patterns of circulation among faith traditions on largely new rails,
and most notably to standardise the limits of circulation due to the self-
entrenchment of national states. In other words, the standardisation of ‘reli-
gion’ based on individual belief was on a par with the subordination of
circulation to the power politics of colonial states and their attendant notions
of sovereignty.36
While these developments did not suddenly discontinue the dynamics of
Islam–Islamdom and their potential for social reconstruction and civilisa-
tional expansion (or entropy), they certainly determined the orientalisation
and, we should add, de-sociologisation of Islam. The big problem with the rise
of European sociology itself has been its initial, and to a large extent enduring
dependence on orientalist knowledge, which resulted in its incorporation of
a conveniently distorted view, of which the Weberian caricature of Islam as a
‘warrior religion’ and ‘monotheism with a tribal face’ was just the bluntest
version.37 The result of this de-sociologisation and de-civilisation of Islam is
the view of a cultural self-limitation inherent in the allegedly totalising reli-
gious orientation of Islamic civilisation. This is seen in turn as working against
the presuppositions of capitalist growth and incremental liberalisation and
democratisation that enlivened the early modern socio-political formations of
Western Europe. Accepting this approach, the Western colonial encroach-
ment upon Muslim lands that unfolded particularly through the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries is interpreted as a necessary consequence (almost a
deserved outcome) of a culturally determined imbalance of power between
the Western and the Islamic civilisations.38
The way forward for the sociology of Islam starts by questioning the hegem-
onic discourse that propounds a standard, package-like, teleological model of
socio-economic and political modernity modelled on a supposed Western
prototype of rights, participation and citizenship that never existed anywhere
in a pure form. In this sense, the project challenges the idea itself of a compact
civilisation, be it Western or Islamic, and focuses on mutual, yet also inner
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DISSONANT POLITICS IN SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
The analysis I have offered in this chapter is far from feeding into a delusional
backward-looking perspective, like saying ‘Islam has been modern before
modernity’ (as perceived by a liberal Muslim intellectual of the calibre of
‘Abduh al-Filali al-Ansari).45 That might have been the delusion of many
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DISSONANT POLITICS IN SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
The cure is not forgetting about sociology, but to deepen its post-Weberian
implications. The emergence of cultural, even more strongly than political,
patterns of non-Western modernity does not express a wave of anti-universal-
ism, but a distancing from a defective and hegemonically exhausted universal-
ism in favour of its reconstruction on the basis of multiple, overlapping
civilisational visions and patterns of imagination. The result seems to be that
even those civilisational visions that rely on images that, from a Western
universal viewpoint, appear as particularistic and exclusive (as in Western
perceptions—or fears—of the Islamic umma), in fact provide global intercon-
nectedness in non-linear ways. These modalities of reconstructing transversal,
transborder forms of civility are largely alternative to modernist parameters of
incorporation embedded in the state–society complex—and in this sense
might well herald yet inchoate post-liberal forms of political modernity that
the sociology of Islam might help to decipher.
148
7
Zaheer Kazmi
Returning from his historic visit to Turkey in November 2014, Pope Francis
joined in the now ritualistic chorus of calls for Muslims to condemn terrorism
in the name of Islam.1 Turkey was once the heart of Orthodox Byzantine
Christianity, until the sacking of Constantinople in 1453. It later became one
of the great centres of Muslim civilisation under the Ottoman Caliphate, which
was replaced by a secular Turkish state in 1923. Unlike his more abrasive pre-
decessor, Pope Benedict, who, in a 2006 lecture at the University of
Regensburg, quoted a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor who called Islam
‘evil’, Francis’s words were chosen more carefully.2 Appealing to interfaith val-
ues, he mostly avoided treading too firmly on what could have been a diplo-
matic minefield—from the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians, which he has
called genocide, to Turkey’s ambiguous relations with jihadis entering Syria,
and what some regard as President Erdogan’s creeping domestic Islamisation.
By drawing attention to what Rupert Shortt has identified as a growing and
virulent strain of religious intolerance in his book Christianophobia (2012),
Pope Francis’s appeal for Muslims to condemn terrorism was, in essence, an
appeal for tolerance towards minorities, especially Christians.3 Prominent
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Christians are increasingly shedding light on the dangers of what they see as a
rise in the ‘mainstreaming’ of minority persecution in the Muslim world,
graphically depicted by the atrocities meted out by Islamic State (ISIS) jihad-
ists in Syria and Iraq and evident also in the killing of Copts in Egypt.4 Muslim
opponents of ISIS often interpret such acts as being either religious aberra-
tions driven by a fanatical fringe, or symptomatic of the ‘blowback’ from
Western colonial legacies and neo-imperial ventures. In this way, a popular
response has been to place faith in the idea that Islam and the majority of
Muslims are moderate.
Even Pope Francis seems to be in agreement on this point, having previ-
ously stated in a Ramadan message to the Muslim world that the true or
‘authentic Islam’ of most Muslims is ‘opposed to every form of violence’.5 This
only highlights how Muslim ‘moderates’ are increasingly replicating the
majoritarian toleration of Western liberals by, like them, making ‘extremists’
of outliers in their own societies. By adopting Western practices in this way,
such ‘moderation’ suggests an absence of authentic thinking and the curious
futility of exhorting Muslims to be more liberal and democratic than they, in
fact, already are. Indeed, projects for moderate Islamic theology—epitomised
in the influential Sunni al-wasatiyyah, or ‘middle way’, agenda today—can be
used against minorities, including within Islam, precisely because they seek to
identify with the West by ‘orientalising’ others. One of the underlying ten-
sions in the middle-way agenda is that it seeks to define itself as representative
of a legitimate majority against an illegitimate minority of Muslims, but that
it lacks the concomitant ideological tools to deal with the rights of minorities,
Muslims or otherwise. This can lead to slippage between its approach to
Muslim ‘minorities’ and ‘extremists’, who are equally conceived in religious
terms as being ‘heretical’ or ‘heterodox’. Conflating the practices of a denomi-
national majority with timeless authenticity, middle-way moderation also
depends upon, and takes its strength from, the brute force of numbers as
much as any theology.6
This chapter focuses on one aspect of the contemporary deployment of the
idea of al-wasatiyyah, which has emerged as an important global discourse
since 9/11—the ideological use of the concept of the ‘middle path’ by promi-
nent contemporary Sunni scholars engaged principally in countering Sunni
Islamist extremism or jihadism. In particular, I focus on the ways in which,
through the idea of the ‘middle way’, a particular theology combines with a
particular narrative of Islamic history, politics and civilisation—based on
majoritarianism—to produce a potent synthetic ideology with ambivalent
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ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY BY NUMBERS
The resort to ‘moderate’ Islam in the face of the rise of global forms of Islamist
violence has in many ways become synonymous with efforts to reassert the
‘classical’ Islam of the four canonical legal schools of the majority Sunni
Muslim sect. This religious impulse has been directed principally at the Salafi-
Wahhabi ideas—and their rejection of the primacy of the authority of the four
canonical schools of Sunni law—seen to be associated with the theology of
the Sunni jihadism of organisations such as al-Qaeda and, latterly, ISIS.7 The
impulse has also been tied to a dominant narrative of Islamic history steeped,
via a ‘Golden Age’, in the grandeur and civilisational achievements of succes-
sive Muslim empires, from the Umayyads and Abbasids through to the
Ottomans. The four schools, named after the medieval Muslim scholars who
founded them (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali), are regarded as authorita-
tive by the vast majority of Sunni Muslims, who adhere to one or another of
them. For these followers, they are seen as the theological bedrock of Islamic
civilisation. These ‘madhabs’, as they are more commonly known, were largely
formalised by the tenth century, at the height of Sunni imperial history, in
order to cement an ideal of orthodoxy against heresy. ‘Moderate’ Islam today
sees the Muslim world’s current woes as a direct consequence of departing
from its true nature and heritage, grounded in this particular reading of
Islamic theology and history.
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Since 9/11 in particular, this impulse has also been tied to a revival of the
concept of the middle way—a rough translation of the term al-wasatiyyah, in
its original Arabic—as the antithesis of religious extremism. With its symbolic
appeal to ‘moderation’ and ‘balance’, the middle way—mentioned in the
Qur’an—has come to be appropriated by a host of influential scholars and
transformed into a global project. Among its most notable proponents are
Yusuf al-Qaradawi in the Arab world, Tahir ul-Qadri in Pakistan and Canada,
Hamza Yusuf in the United States, and Timothy Winter (Abdal Hakim
Murad) in the UK. All are active in debates on Islam in the media and public
arena, and each has sought to cultivate his own personal following. These
self-styled Muslim moderates have positioned themselves as the authentic
expression of Islamic orthodoxy against religious ‘extremism’, while invoking
the compatibility of classical Sunnism, as the majoritarian view in Islam, with
liberal democratic norms. The latter has been used as a means of implying that
this manifestation of Islam is not only the authentic version but that it is also
inherently pluralistic and tolerant.
In a well-known verse, the Qur’an refers to the ummat al-wasatiyyah as a
way of describing the Muslim community.8 While the term itself has no pre-
cise definition in translation, it has generally come to denote moderation and
the idea of a people who follow a ‘middle’, ‘balanced’, ‘just’, ‘fair’ or ‘best’ path,
which represents the hallmark of the Muslim umma. Al-wasatiyyah is, on this
view, the via media between extreme interpretations of the faith—and other
systems of belief—which lie beyond Islam’s periphery. In centring Islam as a
median way of life, al-wasatiyyah is also tied intimately to constructions of
Islamic ‘orthodoxy’. In other words, the middle way is normative Islam and is
seen as fundamentally moderate because this not only ought to be the case,
according to Qur’anic precepts, but is, in fact, true as it is borne out by the
beliefs and practices of a Muslim majority.
As a Qur’anic injunction that is meant to inform the believer’s everyday life
by guarding against zealotry, al-wasatiyyah has been deployed by both Sunni
and Shi‘a scholars. To some extent, it has underpinned ecumenical initiatives
aimed at intra-Muslim unity and moderation, such as the Amman Message.9
This ecumenical tendency is also evident in a major study on al-wasatiyyah by
Mohammad Hashim Kamali and, more generally, in the work of Tariq
Ramadan (who wrote the preface to Kamali’s book).10 While Kamali and
Ramadan tend to include Shi‘ism within their conceptions of what constitutes
normative Islam, they are, arguably, a minority in asserting this firmly and
explicitly. As a prominent contemporary Shi‘i scholar in the West, this explicit
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ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY BY NUMBERS
focus on the centrality of the traditional Sunni and Shi‘i madhabs, and the
importance of Sunni–Shi‘a understanding for defining the normative centre
of Islam, is also mirrored in the work of Seyyed Hossein Nasr.11
At the same time, however, owing to the nature of Shi‘i theology, law and
history, which is absent of any concept of Islamic legitimacy based on majority
rule or majoritarian consensus, al-wasatiyyah in this sense has had only a lim-
ited application.12 It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the concept of the middle
way has tended to loom largest in Sunni Islam, which has been historically
preoccupied from its outset with propagating the ‘orthodoxy’ of the major-
ity—via the institution and ideal of the Caliphate, imagined or otherwise—
against ‘heterodox’ and ‘heretical’ minorities. This has often been tied to the
primacy of Ash’arite (and, to some extent, Maturidite) theology as representing
official Islamic doctrinal orthodoxy against the ‘extremes’ of the Mu’tazilites
(associated with the ‘rationalism’ of the Shi‘a), the ‘violence’ of the historical
Kharijites, and the Atharites (most often associated today with the ‘literalism’
of Salafi-Wahabbism) on a variety of theological issues including the place of
reason, anthropomorphism and the createdness of the Qur’an.13 A kind of
‘neo-Ash’arite’ position—in which its theology is tied explicitly to the idea of
the ‘middle path’ against extremes—is evident today in the thought of
Qaradawi, Winter and Yusuf. Al-wasatiyyah has thus also come to embody a
discourse of power that aims to establish the content and parameters of Islamic
orthodoxy in a milieu of contending interpretations of the faith. In this way, it
can act as a rhetorical device that signals the unique religious legitimacy of
those who expound its virtues and anathematises others outside its fold.
Since 9/11, this ideological function has become increasingly explicit
among prominent Sunni scholars and activists, particularly those who cham-
pion the primacy of the four canonical schools of Sunni jurisprudence, or
madhabs. Here, the concept is often interpolated into wider arguments aimed
at countering the rise of global Sunni Islamist militancy, on the one hand, and
debates about Islam’s compatibility with liberal democracy on the other. In
this context, it has taken on its most explicit political and institutional form
in recent high-profile initiatives sponsored by the Malaysian government,
notably the Wasatiyyah Institute Malaysia, which aim to combat religious
extremism. The assimilation of the concept to liberal democracy has also been
evident in the so-called ‘wasatiyyah’ trend in Islamist movements such as the
Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East.14
Under the banner of the middle way, marginalising or denigrating other
forms of Islam and other faith traditions causes tensions with wider liberal
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
commitments to freedom of expression while closing down the space for rep-
resentative legitimacy in Islam. Religious movements of all kinds will, of
course, always make claims about their own rightful legitimacy. What is sig-
nificant here is how, in order to identify classical Sunnism with authentic
Islam, middle-way moderates draw on modern ideas of majoritarian represen-
tation and legitimacy. In this way, the idea of the middle way can function less
as a theological imperative than a proxy for majority rule. Ironically, this colo-
nisation of the middle ground can provide succour to the intolerance these
figures ostensibly seek to contest. This is illustrated by the way Qaradawi,
Qadri, Yusuf and Winter are all influential figures at the forefront of a global
Muslim ‘moderation’ agenda, but have, at times, equivocated on issues of reli-
gious tolerance. That they all self-identify with Sufism, which has become a
kind of shorthand in the West for Muslim compassion, has done little to miti-
gate this behaviour.
One of the striking things about middle-way intolerance is that it is aired
so openly—a far cry from the xenophobic accusations of duplicity that
Islamophobes peddle. From the rarefied arena of theological polemics to the
more populist pronouncements on Islamic moderation, the upsurge in sectar-
ian violence in the Muslim world has only heightened and widened the scope
of this rhetoric. Provocative language that contributes to conflict has ema-
nated from Muslims of all persuasions. Having promoted themselves as the
bona fide voices of reason and moderation in the battle against Islamist
extremism on the basis of a particular theology, however, one might expect
middle-way moderates to display a consistent degree of religious tolerance.
But if this is not always the case, and apart from the paranoid imaginings of
Islamophobes who, in any case, see all ‘moderates’ as ‘duplicitous’, how can we
make sense of it?
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schools as the fundamental problem with the current direction of the Muslim
world—a strain of thought evident in his many sermons and publications. In
common with his fellow ‘classical’ Muslims, however, this has led him to
preach religious tolerance while practising religious anathematisation.
In Winter’s case, this excommunication is today focused mainly on the
‘deviations’ of Salafi-Wahhabis, on the one hand (despite himself having spent
time in Saudi Arabia learning from Saudi-based clerics), and the Shi‘a, on the
other. This allows him to construct the idea of an authentic Islam as a ‘middle
path’ between two heretical ‘extremes’. Indeed, in perhaps his most widely read
apologetic work, Understanding the Four Madhabs (1999), he states that
‘Sunni Islam’ occupies ‘the middle ground between the two extremes of egali-
tarian Kharijism and hierarchical Shi‘ism’: Kharijism, in its initial violent
iteration as an early denomination in Islam, is today often invoked as a way of
describing al-Qaeda’s theology.16
As an ideological manoeuvre, the strategy of positioning oneself as the
voice of reason between extremes has been increasingly common among rep-
resentatives of classical Islam. In 2008, for example, it was illustrated in the
controversial Channel 4 television documentary in the UK, The Qur’an,
which was even criticised by Muhammad Abdul Bari, the then secretary gen-
eral of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the UK’s largest, predomi-
nantly Sunni, umbrella organisation, as having the potential to incite
sectarianism.17 The documentary’s principal Muslim advisor, Ajmal Masroor,
an imam and MCB member, has frequently appeared on ‘middle-way’ plat-
forms and in 2010 launched an unsuccessful attempt to be elected as a UK
member of parliament for the Liberal Democrats.
As in the documentary—which implicitly asserted a link between the
‘deviation’ from authentic Islam of Wahhabism and Shi‘ism, on the one hand,
and Islamist militancy on the other—these forms of purported ‘heresy’ are, for
Winter, inextricably impelled towards extremism and violence by virtue of
their deviance. This leaves classical Sunnism as the only panacea, harking back
to a supposed pacific and enlightened past and, in the process, burying the
reality of its own sometimes brutal history and mixed record of tolerating
religious dissent. In the post-9/11 climate, where Muslims are frequently
pressed into declaring they are on the right side of a battle against extremism,
Winter and Masroor are, of course, well aware of the rhetorical power and uses
of labelling a particular theology ‘extreme’.
During the rising sectarian violence in Syria in 2012, Winter published his
Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions, a book in the genre of aphorisms
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Defeating deviants
The idea of the Muslim middle way is perhaps most commonly associated
today with the Qatari-based Egyptian scholar Yusuf Qaradawi. He is one of
the most influential Sunni scholars in the world—and probably the most
high-profile one in the Middle East—and has a vast online and satellite TV
presence and following. This has included his own regular primetime pro-
gramme on Al Jazeera with a weekly audience of millions and his chief advi-
sory role to the prominent website ‘IslamOnline’ through which many of his
fatwas are issued globally. Qaradawi’s propagation of the concept of al-wasati-
yyah, for which he is widely known, is an attempt at normalising classical
Sunnism, particularly in Islam’s Arab heartlands but also beyond.
For Qaradawi and his followers, al-wasatiyyah is the normative expression of
Islam and the only solution to the conflict within which the Muslim world has
become mired. Given the vast historical and interpretative pluralism of Muslim
thought and practice, however, it is a discourse that can only be sustained
through a logic of anathematisation even as it preaches tolerance towards others.
Given its associations with ideas of reasonableness, balance and common sense,
the concept of a middle way also maps conveniently on to notions of liberal
rationality and conventional, majoritarian and, therefore, representative view-
points: opposing views within Islam are thus, by extension, seen as irrational,
undemocratic or non-representative. It is little wonder, then, that like Winter,
Qaradawi’s espousal of such orthodoxy in an era of rising sectarian violence has
led, perhaps inevitably, towards labelling other Muslims as heretics. This despite
his previously prominent global role in initiatives aimed at Sunni–Shi‘a under-
standing. Indeed, it is the apparent ease with which Qaradawi’s rhetoric has
slipped so readily from rapprochement to anathematisation that reveals the
ideological malleability and volatility of al-wasatiyyah.
Like Winter, Qaradawi’s position on the Shi‘a echoes that of Salafi-
Wahhabism, though he has been more explicit in commending Saudi clerics
on their disavowal of Shi‘ism as heresy, lamenting that they were ‘more mature
and far sighted’ on the issue than he had previously been.26 This resort to
‘heresy’ is, of course, also driven by a wider geopolitical fear—especially on the
part of Gulf monarchies who have their own restive Shi‘a populations—of
growing Iranian regional hegemony in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and beyond.
Paradoxically, it is, in part, precisely because the official ideology of the Islamic
Republic of Iran has tended to be ecumenical rather than sectarian in reaching
out to Sunni Muslims, that the fear of a so-called ‘Shi‘i crescent’ has been
fuelled. This is most often rendered in the common refrain that they are pros-
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159
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
for the death penalty for such a transgression, including for non-Muslims, it
is fair to say that Qadri’s position is a commonly held Islamic opinion among
Sunni and Shi‘a clerics in Pakistan and elsewhere. The specific problem this
presents for dealing with religious minorities, however, is that it can serve to
fuel a constant fear of trumped-up allegations and, in some cases, vigilante
justice against them. This was illustrated in the burning alive of a Christian
couple in November 2014 by a mob in a Punjabi village.31
Like his orthodox counterparts, it is difficult for Qadri to remain entirely
tolerant when claiming to speak for all Muslims: to retain authenticity as the
representative of Islam, compromises must be made in the name of majoritarian
assent. In nearby South East Asia, where the ‘the middle way’ now functions as
part of official state ideology in Malaysia, the establishment of the Wasatiyyah
Institute Malaysia by the government has also done little to stem the rising tide
of religious chauvinism and persecution against Christians and Muslim minori-
ties. The current Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak—a key figure in the
institute’s foundation and a vocal proponent of the ‘wasatiyyah’ agenda—has
remained largely silent in the face of recent calls to outlaw the non-Muslim use
of the word ‘Allah’ by Christians, and official moves to restrict the religious
activities of the minority Shi‘a community. Perhaps most notably, these latter
developments predated 9/11 and the more recent rise of sectarianism in the
Muslim world in a country often vaunted as a model of progressive Islam.32
More recently, Nasharudin Mat Isa, chairman of the Global Movement for
Moderates (GMM) and former deputy president of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic
Party (PAS), stated that Shi‘ism should be ‘controlled’.33 Razak was also instru-
mental in founding the GMM, which espouses an explicitly ‘wasatiyyah’ agenda
in the interests of promoting wider religious moderation.
Despite their significant global reach, Qaradawi and Qadri hail from the more
traditional Muslim societies of the Middle East and South Asia. The American
Sufi Shaykh Hamza Yusuf—like the British Muslim, Winter, also a Western
convert—is, however, based in the United States. Winter and Yusuf are long-
standing colleagues who have frequently shared platforms, not least for mid-
dle-way initiatives such as the ‘Radical Middle Way’ organisation in the UK
and the Deen Intensive Foundation in the United States. They are also both
proponents of conservative scholars in the Arab world, such as the Saudi-
based Abdullah Bin Bayyah. More so than Winter, Yusuf has, since 9/11,
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ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY BY NUMBERS
become the poster boy for the global propagation of the revival of classical
Sunni orthodoxy. The Zaytuna College in California, which he co-founded,
describes itself as America’s first Muslim liberal arts college, and is now prob-
ably classical Sunnism’s most notable Western outpost.
Yusuf has largely steered clear of the practice of anathematisation that his
bedfellows in orthodoxy have found hard to resist. His belief in the identifica-
tion of an authentic Islam with the tradition of classical Sunnism’s four legal
schools has not yet impelled him to call all those outside this fold ‘heretics’.
But representing the one true Islam is a heavy weight on anyone’s shoulders.
And if that Islam is also the Islam of the many, as classical Sunnism purports
to be, it is always pregnant with the power to extinguish outliers whenever it
may feel under threat. In the current climate of rising sectarianism and increas-
ing attacks on religious minorities in the Muslim world, including Christians,
it is this tendency that has burst forth once again.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the middle way, from the perspective of the West
at least, is how its Sufi figures—often regarded as being steeped in human com-
passion, spiritual mystique and individualistic transcendence—have succumbed
so readily to instrumental rationality in a defence of the majority. While Winter
and Qaradawi display a hollow kind of tolerance towards those with whom they
disagree, the religious politics of Pakistan increasingly trumps Qadri’s religious
ethics. However, the deeper conundrum to probe is why, from positions of insti-
tutional and numerical power, leading figures of moderation still see fit to
engage in divisive theological polemics at a time when the Muslim world has
descended into ever-deeper forms of appalling violence against minorities in
particular. It is difficult to see why equivocation or slander about the validity of
another person’s private religious beliefs should have any place when its public
consequences can prove fatal. Yet it is precisely because the intolerance that
some middle-way moderates display is open—but yet curiously unchallenged
publicly for the most part—that suggests that it represents something different
and more substantial than the crude and misguided accusations about ‘double-
speak’ often pushed by Islamophobes.
Part of the answer might lie in the kind of Sufism adopted by middle-way
moderates, which the stereotypical Western view of Sufism belies. For far from
being the symbol of antinomian exoticism in the popular imagination, Sufism
has also always had austere antecedents who have had a far greater impact on
it. Pivotal figures in the Sufi canon, from Al-Ghazali (d.1111) to Ahmad
Sirhindi (d.1624), were concerned with expunging Islamic mysticism of cul-
tural accretions and ensuring that Sufism accorded with the rigid legalistic
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demands of shari‘a. In this way, one of their aims was to construct a new kind
of majoritarian Sunni orthodoxy and the separation of this ‘authentic’ Islamic
spirituality from the ‘false’ paths of both excessive mysticism and rational-
ism—elements that Shi‘ism in particular was understood to personify and
from which they sought to inoculate Islam. While ‘orthodox’ Sufism has the
latent theoretical potential to anathematise in this way, in the varieties of
actual orthodox Sufi practice such a preoccupation has rarely been the rule,
and even less so as a justification for violence. But it is perhaps no coincidence
that the mixed legacy of Al-Ghazali, the towering mediaeval scholar of the
Seljuk Empire whose job at one time was to propagate such orthodoxy via the
power of the state on the sultan’s behalf, looms large in middle-way projec-
tions of Islam today.34
In the case of Hamza Yusuf, this invocation of Islamic intellectual history
has also extended to rehabilitating the legacy of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328)—a
key figure in Salafi-jihadi thought today—in relation to Islamic moderation:
a reading that has not been without its critics, especially with regard to inter-
pretations of his famous Mardin fatwa.35 In his own time, the Sufism of Ibn
Taymiyya, like that of Al-Ghazali before and Sirhindi after him, though from
a different theological position, was also intimately concerned with anathema-
tising Shi‘ism among other ‘deviant’ groups. Countless high-profile public
statements of Islamic moderation have now been signed by Qaradawi, Qadri,
Winter and Yusuf, some intra- and inter-faith focused. But in staking a claim
for what Islam and its majority adherents really stand for, recourse to the
middle way can easily morph into a discourse of power rather than modera-
tion. As some of the discriminatory policies of former Iraqi Shi‘a Islamist
President Nouri al-Maliki have also shown, no religious sect is immune from
the powerful seductions of majority rule. On the other hand, it is sometimes
argued by middle-way moderates that the lack of a clerical hierarchy in classi-
cal Sunnism means it is intrinsically more open to liberal democracy: some of
the literature on ‘Islamic democracy’ has been premised on this assumption.
But, as the deployment of al-wasatiyyah shows, this is not necessarily the case
because of the peculiar way in which this theological concept, associated spe-
cifically with moderation, can also be subverted so readily for opposing ends.
Holding firm to a belief in the unique sanctity of a medieval legal order and
an account of Islamic imperial history that papers over the legacies of some
deep and violent fissures lessens the possibility of ‘tolerance’, as the rigid asser-
tion of orthodoxy by middle-way moderates today reveals. It may even be
more accurate to assert that the creation of a ‘democratic’ Sunnism today—via
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163
THE STATE
8
Carool Kersten
Indonesia has been affected by successive religious and ideological currents from
both the East and the West. These include various currents of liberalism, which
were deposited during colonial and postcolonial times in what is now the world’s
largest Muslim nation-state. As elsewhere in the Muslim world, responses to
these influences have varied, ranging from adopting and adapting notions of
freedom derived from classical and later also neoliberalism, quarrying the
Islamic heritage itself for equivalent concepts, to the rejection of outside influ-
ences on grounds of their alien—and therefore ‘un-Islamic’ origins.
After a brief historical contextualisation and short excursion into the ambi-
guities of categories such as ‘modernist’ and ‘liberal’ in relation to Islam, the
present investigation will focus on critiques formulated by Muslim intellectu-
als in the aftermath of the fall of General Suharto’s New Order regime in
1998. Situated between proponents of free market economics who are also
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
One of the earliest waves carrying European ideas of liberalism to what were
then still the Dutch East Indies can be traced back to the days of high imperi-
alism. After decades of territorial annexation and blatant exploitation of
resources, at the very end of the nineteenth century Dutch governance of their
South East Asian colonies was redefined as ‘Ethische Politiek’: a paradoxical
mix of continuing subservience to the economic interests of the metropolis
through even more invasive administration, but now expanded with a civilis-
ing mission inspired by the loftier aspects of liberalism’s intellectual heritage.
Lasting until the Japanese invasion of 1942, this included greater efforts
towards educating selected members of the local population—allegedly to
prepare them for home rule, but in actual fact primarily geared towards train-
ing a local human resources pool restricted to staffing the lower echelons of
the colonial administration.
While only a very small number of Muslims entered a Dutch-language
education system, much larger segments of the population went for other
options offered by newly established Islamic mass organisations using indig-
enous and Middle Eastern-inspired Islamic education systems to emancipate
their constituencies. Children of rural Muslim traders and pious peasants
continued to congregate at pesantren, Islamic schools operated by traditional-
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BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
ist religious scholars. In 1926, they had begun to unite in the Nahdlatul
Ulama (NU), an organisation founded in response to the formation, in 1912,
of the modernist Muhammadiyah by urban Muslims from pious backgrounds
who were attracted to the ideas of Muhammad Abduh. In 1923, more rigidly
literalist Islamic reformists had established their own Islamic mass organisa-
tion called Persatuan Islam. During the Japanese occupation, these organisa-
tions merged into the Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia (Masyumi), which,
after the war had ended, continued to function as the largest Islamic political
party during the subsequent independence struggle and early decades of the
Indonesian republic. Although Masyumi campaigned—strenuously but ulti-
mately unsuccessfully—for a reference to shari‘a to be inserted into the newly
independent country’s constitution, its loyalty to Indonesia as a nation-state
reflects the implicit acceptance of the eventual 1945 version of the constitu-
tion as a key instrument of political modernity.
As Zaheer Kazmi and Wael Hallaq note, this dependency on ‘state author-
ity as a critical guarantor’ of religious law ‘inhibited radical and creative think-
ing in Islam’ and prevented the development of a ‘new conception of the law
and legal morality, a new legal system, a new legal culture and education, a
new economy, and a new moral community’, thus binding Islamists and liberal
Muslims together in the same constrictive paradigm.1
Western-style liberal politics was not very conspicuous during the first two
decades of independence as ideological competition was dominated by secular
nationalists, socialists and Islamists vying for political supremacy. Economic
liberalisation only became more noticeable from the 1970s onwards, when
General Suharto’s New Order Regime (1965–98) began using it. It did so,
first of all, to underpin the economic development plans defined by
US-trained economic policy-makers, known as the ‘Berkeley mafia’, which
were primarily geared towards lifting Indonesia out of the economic quagmire
caused by the disastrous left-leaning and authoritarian ‘Guided Democracy’
(1959–65) of the country’s first president, Sukarno. Secondly, it was also
employed to vindicate Indonesia’s security alliance with the West, cementing
in particular relations with the United States and positioning the country as a
South East Asian bulwark against the spread of communism.
Compatible political attitudes were also adopted by certain Muslim intel-
lectuals who developed a kind of symbiotic relationship with the New Order;
looking for a role for Muslim technocrats, professionals and academics in the
government’s development policies while simultaneously agreeing to being
co-opted by the regime as a counterforce to leftist influences. Although the
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had been largely destroyed during the
mass-killings and arrests of PKI members and alleged sympathisers in wake of
the 1965 military coup that had brought General Suharto to power, the spec-
tre of communism and resurgent support for the political left remained one
of the new regime’s main concerns. Liberal- or, perhaps more accurately, lib-
erty-minded Muslims were also considered useful for weaning Indonesia’s
Muslims from Islamist ideas and deflecting any attempts to re-establish the
Islamic Masyumi party or prevent a turn to more reactionary revivalist and
Islamist organisations such as the puritanical Persatuan Islam (Persis) and the
renegade Darul Islam (DI).2
In part motivated by their own anti-communist sentiments, and partly driven
by the ambition to make the Muslim community stakeholders in the govern-
ment’s development policies, in 1970 a group of young intellectuals dominated
by Nurcholish Madjid, then leader of Indonesia’s largest Muslim student organi-
sation, rallied around the idea of a ‘Movement for the Renewal of Islamic
Thinking’ (Gerakan Pembaruan Pemikiran Islam). While remaining institution-
ally amorphous, on the level of ideas the movement was influenced by the secu-
larisation thesis developed by sociologists of religion and theologians such as
Peter Berger, Robert Bellah and Harvey Cox. These developments further
fragmented the Muslim community beyond the traditionalist–modernist divide
of the early twentieth century. Initially, Madjid had been hailed as the political
heir to former Masyumi leader Mohammad Natsir, but after arguing that there
was no need for an Islamic party, he was disowned by a substantial segment of
Indonesia’s Muslim constituency, including the former Masyumi establishment,
Muhammadiyah puritans, and other Islamic revivalists.3
Further intellectual influence was exercised by Leonard Binder and Fazlur
Rahman, who visited Indonesia in the early 1970s to scout for potential par-
ticipants in their ‘Islam and Social Change’ programme at the University of
Chicago. They recruited a number of prominent figures of that generation of
budding Muslim intellectuals and upcoming religious leaders for postgraduate
studies in Chicago. Aside from Madjid, these also included two future and
successive chairmen of the Muhammadiyah: Amien Rais and Ahmad Syafii
Maarif. These intellectual encounters led to a new influx of ideas and con-
comitant—but somewhat cavalier—conflations of Islam with not always
clearly defined notions of modernism and liberalism. Since the resulting ambi-
guities form a central part of the critiques discussed below, it is important to
dwell on the influence of these developments on present-day Muslim thinking
in Indonesia.
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BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
After moving from Pakistan’s Central Institute for Islamic Research to the
University of Chicago in the late 1960s, Rahman had begun developing a new
research agenda and methodology for what he had initially called Islamic ‘neo-
modernism’, but later mainly referred to as ‘contemporary’ or ‘postcolonial
modernism’.4 He used these classifications to distinguish this type of new Islamic
thinking from what he called ‘classical’ Islamic modernism represented by earlier
figures such as Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Muhammad Abduh, but also in con-
tradistinction to the paralleling evolution of Islamic revivalism initiated by the
eighteenth-century Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab into the
neo-revivalism of twentieth-century movements, including Rahman’s own nem-
esis: the Jamaat-e Islami. At the same time, Rahman’s neo-modernism contained
a re-appreciation of Ibn Taymiyya, who is generally associated with (neo-)reviv-
alist thinking. It is this association that would become a focal point for the cri-
tiques examined in this chapter. Rahman considered the Islamic neo-modernism
he had formulated as a ‘prerequisite of Islamic renaissance’.5 Through his men-
torship of figures such as Madjid, Rais and Maarif, this terminology began enter-
ing the Indonesian Islamic vocabulary.
While other contributions to the present volume evince the breadth and
variety of notions of Muslim liberalism, within the context of the present
examination the associations of Islam with liberal or liberalism is confined to
the influence of publications by two American political scientists specialising
in the study of the Muslim world. Appearing exactly ten years apart and coin-
ciding with a crucial decade in Indonesia’s political and cultural-religious his-
tory, Leonard Binder’s Islamic Liberalism (1988) and Charles Kurzman’s
Liberal Islam (1998) have exercised considerable influence on debates among
Indonesian Muslims.6 As will be discussed in greater detail, Binder’s mono-
graph, which carried the subtitle ‘A Critique of Development Theories’, was
generally met with greater approval as it also paid attention to the critics and
detractors of free-market economics, and Western trajectories of modernisa-
tion, including Sayyid Qutb, Samir Amin and Mohammed Arkoun. The
anthology compiled by Charles Kurzman, however, was subjected to more
severe criticism because it vindicated the inclusion of very different types of
Muslim thinkers as long as they could be classified under the contentious and
rather peculiar categories of ‘liberal’, ‘silent’ and ‘interpreted’ shari‘a.7 Thus the
volume presents figures such as Muhammad Iqbal, Fazlur Rahman,
Mohammed Arkoun and Abdullahi Ahmed al-Na’im alongside Yusuf al-
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
‘Islamic references’ during the late New Order and early Reformasi years
Upon his return from the United States in 1984, Madjid established a Muslim
think tank called Paramadina, which also offers ‘self-improvement’ seminars
in five-star hotels for social climbers among Indonesia’s increasingly affluent
Muslim urban middle class. He began moving closer to the New Order estab-
lishment, and eventually even the regime’s top echelons began attending
Paramadina workshops as part of a rediscovery of their own Islamic roots.8
This orientation took Madjid in a different direction from former collabora-
tors in the Renewal Movement, such as economist and Muhammadiyah activ-
ist M. Dawam Rahardjo and the new NU leader Abdurrahman Wahid
(popularly known as Gus Dur), who both opted for grass root-level education
and development projects inspired by left-leaning Arab turāthiyyūn, or herit-
age thinkers, and Latin American liberation theologians.
The opening up of the public sphere during the Reformasi period that fol-
lowed the 1998–9 regime change witnessed unprecedented press freedom, the
establishment of new Islamic political parties and the emergence of a wide array
of NGO and other civil society initiatives, while the leaders of the NU and
Muhammadiyah took control of the two highest political offices in the land:
with Gus Dur becoming the first freely elected president of the republic and
Amien Rais taking the position of speaker of the Consultative Assembly. The
early chaotic years of the post-Suharto era also saw the rise of Muslim militias
and vigilante organisations, as well as yet another influx of liberal ideas. After
9/11, these torrents grew stronger when Indonesia was the first Muslim coun-
try to join America’s ‘War on Terror’, becoming an even more crucial South
East Asian partner after the country was confronted with bombings in Bali and
Jakarta by local Muslim extremists. This resulted in increased US support for
organisations like the Liberal Islam Network ( Jaringan Islam Liberal, JIL) and
for new initiatives, such as the establishment of the Freedom Institute and the
LibforAll Foundation. These platforms functioned not only as Muslim-led
outlets for liberal thinking, often in a neoconservative guise. In close associa-
tion with the administrations of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
(2004–14) and his Democrat Party (Partai Demokrat, PD), they also became
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BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
launching pads for the political careers of some of their founders, although
these have since collapsed amid allegations of corruption, disputes with the
presidential clan or scepticism on the part of their target constituencies.9
Displaying the same bravado and using an equally confrontational rhetoric
as their Islamist adversaries, JIL profiled itself as the key Muslim advocacy
group of liberal democracy in post-Suharto Indonesia. At the same time, JIL’s
reliance on foreign financial aid and support from Western NGOs had
become a liability. The ‘professionalized form of activism’ that tends to be the
outcome of such relationships brings with it ‘a gradual reduction of “civil
society” to the realm of bureaucratic NGOs and formalized “grassroots” insti-
tutions’, which in turn undermines the credibility of platforms like JIL as
genuine manifestations of a vibrant civil society.10 After 2009, the Obama
administration and funding bodies such as the Asia Foundation recognised
these risks and scaled down support for organisations such as JIL, because it
was considered as too much of an intrusion into intra-Muslim debates.11
In Indonesia, too, such associations between Islam and liberalism elicit the
same generic objections from opponents and sceptics as elsewhere in the
Muslim world. Because of its foreign philosophical and ideological roots, such
influences are often termed as a ghazwul fikri or ‘intellectual invasion’.12
Muslims watch with trepidation and suspicion the post-Cold War victory of
free-market economics promoted by a liberal ideology dressed up in the garb
of democratisation and human rights, but in effect pushing a Western neo-
conservative agenda riding on a wave of worldwide commercialisation and
globalising consumerism. Muslim critics of this type of liberalism are not only
found in Islamist organisations such as the puritanical Dewan Dakwah
Islamiyah Indonesia (DDII) but also in the NU and Muhammadiyah.13
Younger cadres from both organisations share a suspicion of free-market
economics and what they perceive as a collusion between Madjid’s later inter-
pretation of Islamic renewal thinking and what in Indonesian is referred to as
Islam Murni, that is, allegedly ‘pure’ or ‘unadulterated’ Islam. These critics seek
to bridge or overcome the conventional division of Indonesia’s Muslim land-
scape into traditionalist and modernist camps by formulating new Islamic
discourses that differ not only from those of the preceding New Order period
but which also provide alternatives to the looming spectre of Islamism repre-
sented by newly formed Islamic political parties and Muslim vigilante organi-
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
sations, such as Laskar Jihad and the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela
Islam, FPI), which appeared amid the breakdown of law and order in the
immediate aftermath of the 1998 regime change. In view of these suspicions
towards the term ‘liberal’, I suggest using the term progressive as an alternative
designation for intellectuals whose writings must not only be read as meta-
critiques of liberal and neoliberal tendencies in Islamic thinking, which rose
to dominance during New Order and which remain prominent in the post-
Suharto era, but also as counter-discourses opposing the various strands of
Islamism that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.
Some of the most incisive critiques of the liberal ideas and political tendencies
exhibited by Indonesian Muslims are articulated by young cadres of the NU
known as Anak Muda NU. A self-described culturally hybrid community of
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BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
ers, including its current Chairman Said Aqil Siradj and Masdar F. Mas’udi,
the former head of NU ‘think tank’ P3M.18 In the mid-1990s, they were
responsible for introducing their younger peers to the writings of another
Arab philosopher: the Moroccan Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabri.19 Like Hanafi,
he belongs to the so-called turathiyyun or ‘heritage thinkers’ who emerged in
the 1970s and 1980s, proposing that Islam is not understood only in conven-
tional terms as a religion consisting of certain doctrinal tenants and theologi-
cal concepts but taken as a ‘civilisation’ with much wider cultural and
intellectual manifestations.
The postra community’s understanding of tradition is broad and pluralist
rather than inclusivist—a crucial differentiation because it is at the core of
some of the critiques of Madjid that will be discussed below. Islamic post-
traditionalism embraces the same catholicity as the Arab heritage thinkers: a
historical but non-teleological understanding of the turāth, or what Hamid
Dabashi, an Iranian-born historian of Islam and cultural critic based at
Columbia University, calls ‘sans historicism’.20 However, in contrast to
Dabashi, the Anak Muda NU is comfortable with simultaneously accom-
modating scholasticism and humanism. Rethinking the role and relevance of
Imam al-Shāfi’ī’s usūl al-fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), Ash’arī and Matūridī and
al-Ghazālī’s Sufism in contemporary Muslim contexts,21 they turn the notion
of Ahl al-Sunna wa’l-Jamā’a (‘those who adhere to the Traditions of the
Prophet and are loyal to the community’, self-identifying as ‘orthodox Sunni
Muslims’) from an identifiable school of thought (madhhab) into a methodol-
ogy (manhaj) for present-day Muslims. This resonates with another proposi-
tion by Dabashi: to regard tradition as ‘a genealogy of here and now rather than
an archaeology of then and there’.22 Retaining an appreciation for localised
religious practices that are characteristic of the traditional Muslim cultures in
maritime South East Asia, Islamic post-traditionalism stands in marked con-
trast to (neo-)modernist and revivalist tendencies that reduce Islam to an
abstraction, empty of any cultural particularities.23 This betrays not only a
further affinity with Dabashi’s depiction of peripheral, vernacular—that is,
non-Arabic—Muslim literary humanisms as by definition ‘multi-cultural and
polyvocal’; Islamic post-traditionalism can also be read as an attempt to build
an alternative moral community along the lines suggested by historian of
Islamic law Wael Hallaq.24 In many respects, then, the resulting alternative
discourse of Islamic post-traditionalism presents a more radical rethinking of
the role of Islam in contemporary Indonesian society than has emerged in
modernist Islamic circles.
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
After Wahid’s impeachment in 2001, the postra community took over as the
torchbearers for this alternative discourse, which is in clear defiance of the
kind of liberal Islam that unabashedly champions capitalist neoliberalism.25
Ahmad Rumadi, research director of the Jakarta-based Wahid Institute,
highlights the difference between such an understanding of liberal Islam
and Islamic post-traditionalism: presenting the latter as a more progressive
and sophisticated strand of contemporary Muslim thinking in Indonesia.
He challenges its cynical rejection as just a form of mimicry employed to
reaffirm a group identity grounded in cultural affiliations with the NU,
insisting that Islamic post-traditionalism has more serious epistemological
ambitions than can be delivered by the proponents of the type of liberal
Islam it seeks to criticise:
Even if the paradigm of liberal Islam stresses the ‘authenticity’, ‘originality’ and the
‘purity’ of Islam, postra is doing better in all these respects because of its familiarity
with modern Arab thinkers like Abu Zayd, Shahrur, al-Jabiri, and others whose
ideas often function as epistemological references. It is therefore no exaggeration to
state that postra is ‘liberal Islam plus’ since it places more value on the local and the
marginal. Personally, I hope liberal Islam will accept [the relevance of ] locality and
situations of marginality as part of their agenda, so that the liberal and postra agen-
das can come together.26
The underlying argument is that by accounting for the local and marginal,
Islamic post-traditionalism brings religion closer to human sensibilities. It
opens up the possibilities for historicised interpretations of Islam as a living
tradition practised in a specific society, at a particular time, and within con-
crete cultural settings.
The earliest critiques of the twin-concepts of liberal Islam/Islamic liberal-
ism were published in 2000, in a theme issue of what would become the flag-
ship periodical for Islamic post-traditionalism: Tashwirul Afkar, a ‘journal for
reflective thinking about religion and culture’. As one of its editors, Rumadi
problematised this association between Islam and liberalism: presenting the
combination as a contradiction in terms, because it seeks to bring together a
religion based on revelation—which is axiomatic and transcendental,
demanding absolute surrender and obedience—with a secular and anti-axio-
matic philosophy based on deconstruction, the rejection of absolute truths
and certainties, and a demand for absolute freedom of thought. Aside from
being a revealed religion, Islam is also a historical religion, conceived and
practised by a community in a particular historical setting. All considered, the
176
BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
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BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
not just liberal Islam but also neo-modernism and Wahhabism.32 He too
challenges the way in which liberal Islam is interpreted in Kurzman’s Liberal
Islam and Barton’s The Idea of Liberal Islam in Indonesia, criticising both not
only for their failure to substantially engage with Wahid’s thinking about
secularism, the ‘cultural localisation of Islam’ (pribumisasi Islam) and social
ethics. Whereas Kurzman does not even mention Wahid, Barton is taken to
task for lumping him together with Madjid and for implying that the labels
liberal and neo-modernist are identical. According to Baso, Barton’s inability
to see that the thought of these two intellectuals developed each in their own
specific setting and epistemological framework reflects a theoretical and
methodological shortcoming. In comparison with Kurzman and Barton,
Binder’s Islamic Liberalism is rated higher, because it is conceived as an open
dialogue between Western and Arab-Islamic thinking. This way, liberalism is
not just traced back to its Western roots, but conceived as ‘a process of give
and take’, in which both Islam and the West give substance to the idea of
liberalism by engaging dialectically with questions of modernity, social trans-
formation and local tradition. In his search for the roots of liberal Islam,
Kurzman, on the contrary, only looks within Islam itself, ignoring the West
as an influential factor in the way liberalism and freethinking in general mani-
fest themselves in the Muslim world and disregarding it as a mitra dialog, or
‘partner in dialogue’, for the emergence of liberal Islamic tendencies.33
Another problem with using only an endogenous Islamic categorisation of
liberal is Kurzman’s clustering of very different thinkers, which stand in sharp
contrast to the individuals featured in Binder’s Islamic Liberalism, and their
critical and dialectical engagement with Western liberal thought, socialism,
Marxism and postmodernism.
Baso’s criticism zeroes in on Madjid’s mentor and supervisor during his
postgraduate studies in Chicago, Fazlur Rahman, alleging that the two
regarded the likes of Ibn Taymiyya and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab as
reformists whose ideas can be interpreted as an indigenous Islamic discourse
of liberation—rather than liberalism. Notwithstanding Rahman’s awareness
of the shortcomings of Salafi thinking and despite the fact that he also does
not go along with their reactionary anti-Western attitudes and fundamental-
ist tendencies, Baso maintains that the neo-modernism advocated by
Rahman is a closed way of thinking not far removed from literalist under-
standings of the Qur’an and exhibiting a degree of anti-rationalism, while
being supportive of reasoning by analogy and partial to orthodox theology.
In the political domain, he accuses neo-modernist Muslims of having ‘inher-
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
ited a mentality that “conflates religion and state” and not foreclosing the
possibility of collusion with the military for the sake of obtaining recogni-
tion for their reform movement’.34 This leads Baso to the allegation that, in
terms of politics, Madjid’s neo-modernism is not all that different from the
Wahhabi movement, and also to the conclusion that Islamic neo-modernism
is very different from the ideas developed by Wahid, which prefigure those of
Islamic post-traditionalism.35
To further tease out these contrasts and differences, Baso takes up al-Jabri’s
‘Critique of Arab Reason’, presenting it as an exercise in deconstructing the
Arab-Islamic legacy both in terms of its epistemology and politics.36
Subscribing to interpretations of tradition as something that is invented and
constructed, Islamic post-traditionalism operates as a ‘hermeneutics of suspi-
cion’—sceptical of the assumption that knowledge production can be neutral,
and an integral and substantialist whole. In the case of the Muslim world, the
foundations for such projections were laid in what al-Jabri calls the ‘Aṣr
al-Tadwīn or ‘Age of Recording’—that is to say, the supposedly ‘true’ or ‘pure
Islam’ defined as early as the second century of the Islamic calendar.37
However, for Baso, deconstructing a tradition is futile if it is not combined
with an effort towards reconstruction. He stresses that, in this respect, Islamic
post-traditionalism contrasts most emphatically with Islamic neo-modernism,
because the envisaged intellectual and social transformation is grounded in
tradition and suffused with what al-Jabri calls the ‘spirit of Averroism’: offering
the germinations of secularisation, democracy and the protection of basic
human rights.38 In the field of Islamic legal thinking, the same ethos animated
the criticism of Imam al-Shāfi‘ī’s text-based paradigm of analogic reasoning by
Ibn Hazm and al-Shāṭibī, leading them to adopt alternative approaches using
the notion of the ‘public good’ (maṣlaḥa), and the integration of the ‘higher
objectives of law’ (maqāṣid al-sharī‘a) into the domain of the ‘foundations of
faith’ (usūl al-dīn).39 In Baso’s view, Wahid’s thinking reflects a similar attitude
in present-day Indonesia. In contrast to the religious symbolism that charac-
terises Islamic neo-modernism and literalist-reformist Islam, Gus Dur was of
the opinion that—in the case of Islam—upholding the formal aspects of a
religion is not enough: it must be an effort of mankind as a whole to liberate
the oppressed.40 With this, Baso makes the liberating function of Islamic post-
traditionalism more articulate and explicit than Rumadi, offering a clear
contradistinction with the liberalisation politics of the Liberal Islam Network
and the Freedom Institute.
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BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Indonesia, and the French Annales school historian and South East Asianist
Denys Lombard. Tracing its origins not only to the Dutch Ethische Politiek,
Ridwan also maps the connections between individual puritan Muslims and
representative bodies and other segments of Indonesian society, including
remnants of the once-powerful priyayi or indigenous court circles; emanci-
pated members of the nominally Muslim peasantry, referred to as abangan;
and migrant Chinese, all of whom benefited from the educational and eco-
nomic opportunities offered in the late colonial era.47 According to Ridwan,
the links that were forged at the time continue to influence the relations
between the upper middle classes even when they subscribe to different ideo-
logical currents. These also include Islamist dealings with political parties such
as the Nationalist PDI-P, and the PPP as the only tolerated Islamic party
during the New Order years, as well as non-partisan heirs of the Masyumi
legacy, such as the DDII and various vigilante organisations.48
Ridwan concludes that the mind set of both the kind of liberal Islam rep-
resented by Madjid and puritan Islam are geared towards defending the inter-
ests of the establishment. Whereas puritans rely on the authority of texts
grounded in a literal interpretation of scripture, liberal Muslims do this by
social-theoretic theorising based on the dominant historiographies, as if these
constitute the sole narrations of the Islamic past.49 Although Madjid stresses
the importance of intellectual creativity and the dialogical relationship
between religion and history, he tends to rely on iconic figures such as
al-Shāfi‘ī, al-Ghazālī, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldūn.50 The
prominence of Madjid’s public persona and his idolisation by younger genera-
tions of Muslim intellectuals exacerbate the effects of his bourgeois interpreta-
tions of Islamic history and religious pluralism. Ridwan points to the irony of
the way in which Madjid’s initially subversive way of thinking has itself
become the dominant discourse, narrowing his brand of Islamic neo-modern-
ism to a single point of reference.
On the conceptual level, bourgeois thinking is elitist and not involved in
any drastic or structural activity towards emancipating the powerless, with
both puritan and liberal Islamic trajectories being geared towards establish-
ment ideas. While the literalist puritans are preoccupied with religious sym-
bolism, supposedly liberal Muslims focus on a strand of liberalism that has
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BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
184
BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
The scholar and man of letters Kuntowijoyo was born into a traditional
Javanese family of shadow puppeteers and copyists of Qur’an manuscripts.
During his student years in Yogyakarta and postgraduate studies at Columbia
University, he dabbled in a variety of cultural activities, publishing a number
of novels and collections of poetry. These creative proclivities also carried
over into his academic work as a social historian who combined social scien-
tific approaches and an understanding of Islam as a civilisation by developing
concepts such as ‘prophetic social science’ and ‘cultural Islam’. These ideas
were elaborated in essay collections with titles such as The Paradigm of Islam
(1991) and Muslims without Mosques (2001).62 In these writings, Kuntowijoyo
attempted to bridge the gap between Islam as an ideal type and the social
reality of Muslim communities by using social theory. Inspired by Thomas
Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm shift, and with further bows to Marx and
Wittgenstein, he asserted that the potential of religion as a transformative
force is socially, ideologically and linguistically determined.63 Because the
development of an endogenous Islamic social theory is still in its infancy,
Kuntowijoyo felt vindicated to quarry Western social theories, ‘pedagogies
of the oppressed’, and theologies developed by Marx, Max Weber, Émile
Durkheim, Paulo Freire and Latin American liberation theologians in order
to use them as building blocks for transforming Islamic normativity into a
method of social enquiry combined with an engaged concern for what the
Qur’an calls the dhu’afa and mustadha’ifin—the ‘weak and downtrodden’.64
This is not the only resonance with Ridwan’s typology of the liberation
approach to religiosity; he actually explicitly mentions Kuntowijoyo’s obser-
vation that it is entirely appropriate to use the notion of bourgeoisie in
Muslim contexts.65
Unlike many of his peers in the Muhammadiyah, anthropologist Moeslim
Abdurrahman (1948–2012) spent time in traditional Islamic pesantrens
before attending universities in Indonesia and the United States. This enabled
him to establish a rapport with NU leader Abdurrahman Wahid; a relation-
ship that was also based on their joint appreciation of Hanafi’s manifesto for
an Islamic Left. Working as a university lecturer and NGO activist,
Abdurrahman wrote a book called Transformative Islam (1995), in which he
too argued for a ‘transformative social science’ and a cultural role for reli-
gion.66 After Muhammadiyah Chairman Ahmad Syafii Maarif recruited him
in 2003 to help develop a cultural Islam by putting him in charge of the Maarif
Institute for Culture and Humanity, Abdurrahman’s book Transformative
Islam became a foundational text for JIMM. While his ideas about the cul-
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tural role of religion are closely linked to those of Kuntowijoyo, they have a
firmer social-scientific underpinning.67
Meanwhile, proponents of transformative Islam, such as economists
Dawam Rahardjo and Adi Sasono, accuse Kuntowijoyo and Abdurrahman of
intellectual elitism, claiming their theories are still too acclimatised to hegem-
onic discourses of Sunni orthodoxy and Islamic rationality, which historically
sided with those holding political power. While Sasono is unapologetic about
his Marxist leanings, Rahardjo refused to become a ‘vulgar follower’ of either
Marxism of Weberian dependency theory.68
These different strands of modernist Islamic thinking come together in
JIMM, combining segments of the Muhammadiyah from traditionalist NU
backgrounds and representatives of a ‘proletarian Muhammadiyah’, which
historian Munir Mulkhan refers to as Munu and Marhaenis Muhammadiyah
(Marmuh) respectively.69 JIMM was established in 2004 with institutional
support from Muhammadiyah’s central board, including Chairman Syafii
Maarif, Munir Mulkhan, and the rector of the State Islamic University in
Yogyakarta, Amin Abdullah. This political backing was short-lived because
the trio—disparagingly referred to by its puritan adversaries as Paman Sam or
‘Uncle Sam’ (in reference to their first names)—were ousted in a conservative
take-over of the organisation’s central board in 2005. Despite losing this top-
level support, the network continues to present itself as the ‘Second
Muhammadiyah’, in the sense that it wants to ‘re-intellectualise’ the
Muhammadiyah through an agenda founded on ‘three pillars’.70 First of all, the
Muhammadiyah should explicitly self-identify as a social movement; secondly,
using structural hermeneutics and social theorising, they envisage a more
multi-vocal organisation; and finally, intellectuals must become actual agents
of social change.71 For this transformation of intellectuals as mediators of ideas
into activists on the basis of their knowledge and personal conduct, JIMM
members evoke the Qur’anic notion of the ulū’l-bāb, or ‘wise ones’.72
Unlike the postra community, JIMM co-founder Zuly Qodir subscribes to
the view presented by Greg Barton that Madjid and Wahid can both be con-
sidered Islamic neo-modernists. At the same time, he stresses that JIMM’s
transformative Islam is not a sub-category of this Islamic neo-modernism of
the 1980s and 1990s, but a separate discursive formation branching off from
Cak Nur’s earlier renewal thinking of the 1970s.73 In contrast to the ‘first
Muhammadiyah’s’ internal debates on the theological aspects of Islamic
renewal thinking or its preoccupation with traditionalist ‘deviancies’ captured
in the terms takhayyul, bid‘a and churafat (deviancies, unlawful innovations
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BOURGEOIS ISLAM AND MUSLIMS WITHOUT MOSQUES
and superstition, or TBC), the new generation is more concerned with politi-
cal and social praxis, which need to be actualised within a plural society.74
JIMM also condones the accommodative-conformist disposition of its intel-
lectual and political mentors towards the regime during the New Order years.
Seeing no conflict between Pancasila and Islam, and thus no need for an
Islamic state, the network also agrees with intellectual benefactors that ‘the
essence for political parties should be a political ethics’, and that the basis for
party-political struggles should be value-driven, not whether a party is Islamic
or secular-nationalist.75
Conclusion
Although they build on the same ideas about the role of religion in Indonesian
society as their intellectual predecessors of the 1970s and 1980s, many of the
intellectuals who came of age in the 1990s are more focused on applied think-
ing and the dissemination and interpretation of universal themes such as
democracy, justice, community development and battling corruption. The
sweeping ideas introduced by the likes of Madjid and Wahid may have caused
Indonesian Muslim intellectualism to run out of steam, but their successors
are aware that these grand narratives need to be transformed into concrete
intellectual projects, translating ideas into plans of action for the betterment
of Indonesian society.
Observed from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, the political
regime changes that affected Indonesia in 1998 and the Arab world in 2011
also represent significant epistemic shifts. However, whether the discourse
critiques produced in the early 2000s by Indonesia’s new Muslim intelligentsia
reflect Mohammed Bamyeh’s suggestion that there is something called an ‘anar-
chist gnosis’ remains a question.76 In the end—like their predecessors—neither
the Anak Muda NU nor JIMM appear to dispute the value of the Pancasila
doctrine for Indonesia as a multi-ethnic and religiously plural country. They
have not fundamentally questioned functionalist and rationalised understand-
ings of religion, or—for that matter—the existence of the nation-state. Despite
their incisive critiques of Islamism and Muslim liberalism, the Anak Muda NU
and JIMM also find it difficult to escape from Weber’s ‘iron cage’.
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9
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
What makes the Iranian case so pertinent is that the Islamic revolution of
1979 is an ongoing process. Beyond the pragmatism that the humdrum affairs
of governance demand, there is no consensus in Iran about the core tenets of
the revolution, neither within the state nor society.1 The issue of freedom is
particularly contested. Consequently, what has happened since the establish-
ment of the Iranian Islamic Republic in 1979 is a struggle to define the revolu-
tion and its place within Iranian history. The polity that emerged has been
contested by a wide range of intellectuals, students, workers, women’s rights
activists and members of the Iranian state itself. Hence the recurrent spells of
upheaval, the discourse of reform, and recurrent mass demonstrations in
favour of change.2 What we have witnessed, in short, is a struggle for the
meaning of the Islamic revolution, which is framed in terms of a struggle for
freedom from the authority of the state on the one side, and from foreign
dictates on the other. As such, the revolution is a continuation of Iran’s histori-
cal quest for representative government and independence.3
Islamic symbols, imagery and norms, moulded and reconstructed in
accordance with historical necessity and Iran’s political culture, were repeat-
edly employed in order to articulate this quest for freedom. There was cer-
tainly no exclusively ‘Islamic’ narrative to establish a freer society. Islam in Iran
(as anywhere else) has been invented and reconstructed in close dialogue with
the political, economic, cultural and sociological realities on the ground. True,
in the popular imagination in the West, Islam continues to be the antithesis to
liberal ideas: if the ‘West’ represents feminism, democracy, freedom of speech
and religious tolerance, the Muslim world is regularly represented as inher-
ently misogynistic, homophobic, authoritarian and antagonistic. But the
political thought of the figures I will discuss seems to indicate that Islam could
be a blueprint for liberalism, pluralism and democracy as much as a recipe for
dictatorship—depending on how the canon is interpreted, Islam can be revo-
lutionary, as in the political thought of Ayatollah Khomeini, or it can be lib-
eral and democratic as in the writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen
Kadivar, Hasan Eshkevari and others. The truth is that Islam can be turned
into a recipe for dictatorship or a philosophy accentuating freedom. Modern
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ISLAMIC SECULARISM AND THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM
Persia, seen as a Trojan horse for further imperial control of the country.
The role of Ayatollah Shirazi was certainly important, and his activism is
analytically pertinent given that it galvanised the clerical strata into a politi-
cally active role. But the opposition to the Qajar monarchy at the end of the
nineteenth century was expressed by several strata of Iranian society.4 The
revolt was aided and abetted by a range of individuals and movements. The
role of Jamaladin al-Afghani (also known as Asadabadi), one of the most pro-
lific and prominent non-clerical pan-Islamists, for instance, has not been
explored in the scholarly literature.5 Yet it was al-Afghani who colluded with
leading clerics in the seminaries of Qom and Najaf to galvanise protests
against the tobacco concession. This explains the ability of the movement to
move beyond and motivate several strata of society.6 As a result of this resist-
ance to the Qajar monarchy, al-Afghani was exiled to Iraq, from where he
continued to agitate against the concession and Iran’s dependence on foreign
powers. The ensuing revolts that started in Shiraz and moved to Tabriz and
from there to Isfahan and elsewhere forced King Nasseredin Shah to revoke
the concession.
With the tobacco revolts, we find, for the first time in modern Iranian
history, a mass upheaval against the monarchy and in opposition to outside
interference in Iranian affairs. With al-Afghani, and later with his Egyptian
disciple Muhammad Abduh, an Islam emerged that was geared to themes such
as progress and independence. Freedom was not merely sought from oppres-
sive governments but also from imperialism, in this case in its British variant.
Al-Afghani was also a proponent of the constitutional revolution in Iran,
which occurred primarily between 1906 and 1907. This upheaval led to the
establishment of a constitutional monarchy in Iran and entrenched the vocab-
ulary of liberalism and republicanism in the country. As with the tobacco
revolt, freedom was not associated merely with opposition to the Qajar mon-
archs but also to imperialism. After all, during this period, Iran was divided
into so-called spheres of influence, with the north being under Russian super-
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
vision and the oil-rich south of the country under British control. In 1906,
Iran established a parliament and adopted the country’s first modern constitu-
tion. But in 1921, Reza Khan took over the state in a coup d’état and estab-
lished an authoritarian monarchy that lasted until 1941, when he was ousted
by the British, who remained the dominant external force in Iranian affairs
until 1971, when British forces retreated from the Persian Gulf.
The third example, and perhaps the most consequential for the Islamic
revolution in 1979, was the nationalisation of Iran’s oil company under the
premiership of Dr Mohammad Mossadegh between 1951 and 1953.
The two grand ambitions of Iran’s modern history, democracy and independ-
ence, were also central to the Islamic revolution. The mainstream Iranian revo-
lutionaries imagined an authentic Iranian-Islamic order that would be
accountable to the people and independent of the dictates of external powers.
Hence the revolutionary slogans na sharghi na gharbi jomhurye eslami (neither
eastern nor western, only the Islamic republic) or esteghlal, azadi jomhurye
eslami (independence, freedom, Islamic republic). Iran, even today, is in many
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ISLAMIC SECULARISM AND THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM
ways trying to bridge the tensions between these slogans. Even Ayatollah
Khomeini had to engage with these narratives in order to boost his position
within the revolutionary struggle. If freedom and democracy were not at the
heart of the revolutionaries’ demands, Khomeini would not have been forced
to refer to the ‘God-given right of freedom and liberty’ that Islam guarantees,
nor to emphasise that ‘freedom is the primary right of humans’ at the begin-
ning of the revolution, promises he breached rather blatantly once his vision
for the Iranian state was institutionalised.7 Khomeini spoke liberal and acted
authoritarian, not least because he was more concerned with solidifying the
state’s power than the sovereignty of the people. In this sense, Khomeini was
a typical modernist—a state-builder par excellence.8
Mehdi Bazargan provides an interesting example of how the Islam that was
invented in the build up to the Iranian revolution (especially in the 1970s)
was amenable to democracy and a liberal order within society, and stood in
opposition to a totalitarian interpretation of the state. Bazargan was the first
director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) after its nationalisa-
tion during the Mossadegh premiership. In 1961, he founded the Freedom
Movement of Iran, which comprised such iconoclastic figures of Iran’s intel-
lectual and political scene as Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, Ali Shariati and
Yadollah Sahabi, and in 1977 he established Iran’s Human Rights Association.
For this generation of Iran’s political class, Islam was a conduit for instituting
pluralism, human rights and democracy. In this vein, the Freedom Movement
of Iran’s charter declares that the ‘servitude of God requires refusal of servi-
tude to any other master. Gratefulness to God is contingent upon gaining
freedom and utilising it to attain rights, justice, and service.’9 For Bazargan
himself, ‘freedom is God’s gift to His steward on earth, humankind. Whoever
takes away this freedom is guilty of the greatest treason against humankind.’10
As such, Bazargan was strongly opposed to the absolutist interpretation of
Islam that the Khomeinist forces espoused in their emphasis on the total sov-
ereignty of the Supreme Jurisprudent (velayat-e faqiye motlaq) who would be
positioned at the helm of the state. ‘Islamic government’, Bazargan argues
‘cannot help but be at once consultative, democratic, and divinely inspired.’11
It must follow from this that ‘in Islamic government the relations among indi-
viduals and the administration of society are predicated upon relative shared
freedom and mutual responsibility’. In more concrete terms, this means that
‘Islam permits difference of opinions even within the realm of the tenets of
religion, let alone in administrative and governmental issues. Shi‘i theology
under the rubric ijtihad [independent reasoning]’, Bazargan pointed out, ‘has
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left the gate of such debates open until the end of the time and the coming of
the messiah.’12
Consequently, the Supreme Jurisprudent or any ‘source of imitation’ (the
highest Shi‘i authority) cannot claim to be infallible. Citizens should be free
to express their grievances because ‘freedom means the freedom to oppose,
criticize, and object—even if the criticism is untrue and unjust. Where there
is freedom there are opponents and currents that disturb routine stability and
normalcy.’13 In terms of governance, all of this translates into the ‘principle of
division of powers and their mutual non-interference and orderly checks and
balances’. The Islamic corpus, the Qurʾan and the Sunnah, according to
Bazargan’s interpretation, is intrinsically just and partial to freedom of choice:
‘God bestows both freedom and guidance concerning the consequences of
actions. His mercy is infinite and His vengeance great.’ In the end, individuals
must choose for themselves: ‘Freedom exists, so do responsibility and restraint.
The choice is ours.’14
This emphasis on freedom and individual choice is shared by Ayatollah
Taleghani, perhaps the most prominent clerical ally of Bazargan. Taleghani
was one of the co-founders of the Freedom Movement of Iran. His discourse
typically blended leftist ideas into his vision of Islam. Prominent among the
Iranian intelligentsia and opposed to Khomeini’s doctrine of the velayat-e
faqih (rule of the Supreme Jurisprudent), Taleghani argues that ‘government
must be like the representative and deputy of individuals and not the repre-
sentative of a special class … Its purpose is nothing but the preservation of
individual rights and of the collectivity of individuals.’15 It follows that ‘gov-
ernment does not have the right to deprive or limit the freedom and inde-
pendence of individuals or the rights of some classes for the profit of another
class in the name of the higher good of the government’.16 In the last sermon
Taleghani delivered before his death in September 1979, in a period when his
opposition to Khomeini had become more explicit, he emphasised that the
goal of the Prophet Muhammad himself was to ‘free the people, to free them
from class oppression, to free them from pagan thoughts which had been
imposed upon them, to free them from the ordinances and laws which [were]
imposed for the benefit of one group, one class, over others’.17 According to
Taleghani, the ‘call of Islam is the call to mercy and freedom’. With reference
to the Qurʾan, he argues that
even the sinner who is condemned to death—under Islamic law there is mercy for
him too. … His [the Prophet’s] jihad [religious struggle] was mercy, his hijra
[migration from Mecca to Medina] was mercy, his laws were mercy, his guidance
over principles was mercy—the Islamic order ought to be based on mercy.18
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ISLAMIC SECULARISM AND THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM
Of reformed revolutionaries
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
been forced into exile without recourse to any institutional resources in Iran.
The trajectory of Soroush’s fate is emblematic of these devoured children of
the revolution. Soroush was a member of the Cultural Revolution Council,
which was responsible for reforming the universities in accordance with new
revolutionary realities. In retrospect, he has tried to downplay the role of the
council in the purges of scholars, in particular in the humanities and social
sciences, and the closure of the universities to those ends. According to him,
the ‘purges did not start in universities … nor were they initiated or continued
in universities by the Cultural Revolution Institute’.21 Yet at the same time, he
concedes that ‘the first things that happened on the morrow of the victory of
the revolution [were] purges’. These were not decreed by the Cultural
Revolution Institute of which he was a member, he claims, but were primarily
political in nature. ‘Most of the political groups supported them’, Soroush
maintains, and
it was only the Prime Minister [Bazargan] of the provisional government who
objected … And he managed, within the limits of his powers, to reduce the number
of purges, although, of course, this earned him some curses from those clerics and
political activists who didn’t like him and who called him a colluder. As to the
expulsion of academics, if the Revolution Council asked the University of Tehran’s
chancellor to participate in the purges and to expel professors—and he assented—it
never put such a request, even implicitly, to the Cultural Revolution Institute and
there was no suggestion of it in Imam Khomeini’s letter to the institute either.22
Soroush is clearly trying to address the allegations that he was part of the
problem and that his calls for reforms today are hypocritical. He was certainly
not known for opposing the purges when he was a member of the Cultural
Revolution Council. At the same time, he was a small cog in a big revolution-
ary machine and was simply not in a position to decide the fate of others.
Soroush’s writing is laden with complex philosophical concepts that are
used to put forward an interpretive, hermeneutical approach to the corpus of
Islam (i.e. the Qurʾan, the Sunnah and the hadiths). From his perspective,
knowledge about Islam expands and contracts with reference to historical
circumstances: ‘The theory of the contraction and expansion of religious
interpretation’, Soroush claims, ‘separates religion and religious knowledge,
considers the latter as a branch of human knowledge, and regards our under-
standing of religion as evolving along with other branches of human knowl-
edge’.23 This distinction merits and requires constant reform and renewal
through ijtihad. ‘To treat religious knowledge, a branch of human knowledge,
as incomplete, impure, insufficient, and culture-bound; to try to mend and
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ISLAMIC SECULARISM AND THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM
darn its wears and tears is, in itself, an admirable and hallowed undertaking.’24
Given that religious knowledge can never really be complete, it cannot be
monopolised by one religious leader. ‘The acceptance of the sovereignty of
religion is far from putting one’s own words in the Prophet’s mouth and arro-
gating his seat to oneself.’ Rather the contrary. For Soroush, it ‘means a sincere
attempt to understand his message through repeated consultation with the
sacred text and the tradition. Scholars of religion have no other status or ser-
vice than this.’25
Soroush calls for a pluralistic understanding of Islam and a democratic
order based on spiritual values. Within such an ‘Islamic-democratic’ polity,
human rights would have to be cultivated and secured, given that ‘a religion
that is oblivious to human rights (including the need for humanity for free-
dom and justice) is not tenable in the modern world. In other words, religion
needs to be right not only logically but also ethically.’26 Soroush does not
explicitly address the plight of non-believers within such a religiously inspired
system, but in his writings and lectures he repeatedly alludes to the freedom
of choice that any Islamic government must ensure:
To be sure, contemporary advocates of human rights can claim no monopoly on
truth and justice; nevertheless, religious societies, precisely because of their reli-
gious nature, need to seriously engage in discussion of the issues they pose. Not
only did our predecessors passionately debate such extrareligious issues as the ques-
tion of free choice and the question of the limits of God’s rights to overburden the
faithful with religious obligations, but Islamic society felt a religious obligation to
allow such debates to spread and prosper. By the same token, the extrareligious
debates of our day, which happen to concern human rights, must be viewed as
worthy and useful exchanges of opinions in Islamic society. The partisans in these
debates deserve a blessed respect, and the outcome of such discussions should be
heeded and implemented by the governments. … Observing human rights (such as
justice, freedom, and so on) guarantees not only the democratic character of a
government, but also its religious character.27
As indicated, Soroush is rather abstract, metaphysical, almost gnostic in his
writings and lectures. Mohsen Kadivar, who emerged as one of the most influ-
ential reformist clerics in Iran until he was harassed into exile in the United
States in 2008, addresses the themes of democracy and liberalism, including
the rights of non-believers, in rather more explicit terms, quite comparable to
the affirmation of freedom and democracy by Bazargan and Ayatollah
Taleghani. In this vein, Kadivar suggests that ‘freedom of religion and belief
means an individual’s right to freely choose any and all ideologies and religions
he likes’.28 In addition, this refers to the ‘freedom and the right to think to have
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beliefs and values, to express one’s religion and opinions, to partake in reli-
gious rites and practices … and to be able to freely critique one’s religion’.29
According to Kadivar, even non-believers (kaffir) should not be punished for
their beliefs: ‘The persecution of a heathen is unjustified in Islam. Through
renewed ijtihad (independent reasoning), and based on the correct principles
of the Qurʾan and the hadith, freedom of religion and belief can be achieved
through Islam.’30 Comparable to Bazargan, who refers to God-given parame-
ters framing a free society,31 Kadivar indicates that Islam represents ‘the cor-
rect and just religion’ and warns of ‘divine punishment at the end of time’,32
but he maintains that Islam secures the ‘right of choice in beliefs and in actions
in all areas so long as these beliefs and actions do not deprive others of their
rights or do not disturb public peace and order’. While it is legitimate and
salutary to invite others to embrace Islam (dawa), Kadivar reiterates that the
Qurʾan explicitly states that there is no compulsion in religion. It must follow
quite rationally that
non-Muslims living inside or outside Muslim lands have peace and security so long
as they do not wage war on Islam. Whether or not they believe in one of the sanc-
tioned religions or in falsehood, no Muslim has the right to disrupt their peace
simply because their beliefs are different. This assertion is substantiated by the
eternally valid verses of the Quran … To sum up, even though most of the interpre-
tations of Islam that are prevalent today augur poorly for freedom of religion and
belief, a more correct interpretation, based on the sacred text and valid traditions,
finds Islam highly supportive of freedom of thought and religion and easily in
accord with the principles of human rights.33
The thinkers covered in this chapter have sought to reinvent Islam as a via
media between the authoritarian status quo in Iran (and the Arab world) and
a liberal order that would ensure democracy, freedom of belief and religion,
and ultimately a liberated society. Such thinkers have reconceptualised Islam
as inherently pluralistic, just, accommodating, non-doctrinal and essentially
democratic.34
In these theories of Islam, freedom comes first and religious ordinances are
relegated to individual choice. Islam, in this hermeneutical re-evaluation, is
essentially secularised. At the same time, even this secular Islam retains its
identitarian precepts and an underlying sense of superiority. While emphasis-
ing the role of Islam in liberating and democratising society, there continues
to be a hierarchy, on top of which we find the enlightened Muslim who speaks
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202
10
Ahmed Dailami
Introduction
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the expansion of the third
Saudi state in a series of conquests that brought most of the Arabian Peninsula
under the authority of a single dynasty. For our purposes, the details of this
military expansion are not as consequential as the way in which historians
have explained how it was possible to sustain and consolidate: a Faustian pact
of sorts between the new ruling dynasty and a Wahhabi clerical establishment.
Central to this narrative are the marauding Ikhwan, the armed group of
Wahhabi warriors who fought for the house of Saud, but also provided the
conquests with an ideology: that of the zealous missionary. We have a variety
of convincing histories that account for the process by which the pact emerged
and was consolidated among a variety of social groups.3 However, once King
Abdulaziz, as head of his dynasty, began to behave like a politician rather than
the imam (most prominently, disallowing the Ikhwan to attack British pro-
tected territory around the Gulf, Iraq and Jordan), the pact immediately broke
down. Abdulaziz, by then king of Nejd and the Hijaz, had to crush a rebellion
by the Ikhwan in 1928, temporarily pacifying the militant element within the
Wahhabi clerical establishment and their following.
Since then, the Saudi state has drawn limits as to where and how the moral
authority of the ‘ulamā’ or clergy applies, and where it stops, thus allowing
historians to speak of a ‘clear division of labour’ between the political author-
ity of rulers, and the moral authority of clerics in Saudi Arabia.4 Yet the dif-
ferentiation between religion and politics that almost all historians of the
Saudi Arabian monarcho-religious ‘system’ cite only accounts for it on the
‘diplomatic’ level, analytically separating religion from politics on this one
count (the historical events of the pact, and subsequent Ikhwan rebellion in
1928) in order to connect the two even more closely on the level of mundane
politics and Saudi Arabian state-building (the building of religious schools,
the ‘ulamā’ being on state payrolls, the moral police’s relationship with the
wider public). In other words, the relationship between political and religious
authority becomes an organic historical growth that no longer evokes the
problem of sovereignty in trying to identify if and where it resides. In fact, the
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that the Saudi and other Gulf governments strongly advocate precisely as a
response to fundamentalist violence, it becomes a category of political calcula-
tion rather than moral conviction. In other words, moderation is a result of a
sovereign decision, in the strong Schmittian sense: a deviation from jihadi-
Salafism’s doctrine or laws. In that sense, there is something fundamentally
intractable at the core of the political order in Saudi Arabia. Yet such intrac-
tability is something that those insisting on separate discussions about Islamic
or economic reform and the political form of the state are unwilling or
resistant to acknowledge. As much as they may try, there cannot be a clear-cut
separation between the norms of a legal system rooted in shari‘a and the facts
of political power as they stand. Yet this is precisely what liberal Islamist
reformers insist on doing.
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ment to the application of religious law alone would suffice, without consider-
ing the way in which it relates to matters of sovereignty, or the political form
of the state that he calls nizam al hukm. Accordingly, al-Qasim wishes to solve
the problem of militancy by reducing the scope for arbitrary power to operate
through the juridical apparatus of the state. To him, eliminating the legal gaps
left open to manipulation, corruption, dishonesty or oppression would not
only eliminate the social roots of jihadism but also bring the state into recon-
ciliation with itself, as one imagined to be in consistent application of the
shari‘a. This renders both the problem of jihadi radicalism and its solution
(juridical reform) social matters that stem from the appropriate interpretation
of scripture, and its limitation to areas of law in which there is no dispute
among scholars.
An example of how this would be achieved is al-Qasim’s advocacy of the
withdrawal of all legal force from existing laws or legal norms that derive from
any human juridical effort: ijtihad. Any matters around which there is some
disagreement would therefore be left to resolution through private choice. For
example, al-Qasim’s reformed laws would decouple how individuals comport
themselves in public and the state’s ability to regulate it, given that much of
the regulation of public comportment in Saudi Arabia (dress codes, women’s
freedom of movement, etc.) is derived from human juridical effort. This would
amount to a radical, if not revolutionary disempowerment of the clerical
establishment, and a sharp contraction to its sphere of influence. Moreover,
when al-Qasim advocates the elimination of ijtihad in matters of legislation,
he envisions replacing it with a scientific approach to ‘public policy’. To link
the shari‘a (stripped of human deductive efforts) and public policy he advo-
cates the use of post-Aristotelian philosophy and the human and social sci-
ences. For example, economics would replace ijtihad on financial matters, and
psychology on certain questions of family law. Thus contrary to the Islamic
revolution in Iran that placed the jurist at the helm of political power, the
liberal or reformists among the Wahhabi establishment are engaged in an
intellectual effort to eradicate the place of jurists in favour of laws forged in
rational social-scientific thought.
Yet every attempt by a liberal (broadly defined) religious scholar such as
al-Qasim to engage in problem-solving of this kind runs aground when defin-
ing the mechanism that would engage in such an effort of reform: the state.
For al-Qasim, ‘the state is not the regime’. His is an attempt to separate the
nature of sovereignty in Saudi Arabia (absolute hereditary monarchy) from
the institutional-legal apparatus of the state. It is a technocrat’s definition of
the state born out of a desire to protect it from those who have deemed it an
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Yet the altered priorities that emerged out of a sectarian war in Iraq, and the
mass mobilisations of the Arab Spring, made such gradualist visions of social
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between religion and politics are infinitely more difficult. This is why, although
well meaning, the task of the liberal jurist in the figure of Abdulaziz al-
Qasim—and his attempts to separate a reformed shari‘a from matters of politi-
cal power—will inevitably be of limited efficacy. In contrast, Shaykh Salman’s
call for war on theocracy represents the monarchy’s early pangs of estrangement
from the language of religious sanction in a more malleable political context of
the smaller states of the Gulf. For now, the former wields the law, while the
latter the rhetoric of reason and reasonability. Both encourage distinctions
between private and public; between conscience and politics. Yet their mutual
challenge (and particularly for al-Qasim) remains that the political authority
of monarchs (as such) in Arabia was never a fully differentiated functional
system with its own media, codes, organisations and roles, which was then
‘coupled’ with some form of Islam, or as in Saudi Arabia, with Wahhabism.13
That is why scholars historically only speak of it in terms of the pre-monar-
chical ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ authority. In order to be able to speak of fully dif-
ferentiated political and religious systems (and therefore describe some alliance
in which they then entered), there would have to be at least a political code that
has been built around the issue of power, and why it should be in the hands of
particular individuals, and a religious code dedicated to the issue of morality/
transcendence, and so on. The former does not exist as an officially adopted
doctrine, nor is monarchism even spoken of as a category of political thought in
its own right. Hence, to desacralise kingship here is to engage in an act of politi-
cal creation, and not merely to fall back on custom. And it is this act that a
prince may be more equipped to handle than any jurist unwilling to engage with
questions on the sources of sovereignty that lie beyond religious justification.
Conclusion
Corey Robin’s 2011 book on conservative political thought defines conserva-
tism at its most abstract as ‘a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—
the felt experience of having power, feeling it threatened, and trying to win it
back’.14 This is perhaps why shifts in the language of conservative politics are
often, if not always, precipitated by crisis. At any rate, only a crisis worthy of
pragmatic change in the face of mortal danger to the status quo has produced
any such accelerated periods of political activity among the Gulf ’s ruling
elites. Most notably, the Islamic Revolution, and the fall of the Middle East’s
most formidable monarchy in 1979, instigated the formation of the GCC as
a union of monarchies itself. That was the first formal expression and commit-
ment in the Gulf to itself as a political idea.
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Since then, a small army of pundits has made a career out of predicting the
fortunes of Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Iran. Such commentary, and
indeed the majority of work on the Gulf, has now placed sectarian affiliations
at the centre of the political debacle that supposedly shapes the political for-
tunes of the entire region. This is why commentators fixated on the execution
of prominent religious scholar and activist Nimr al-Nimr, while largely ignor-
ing the more telling fact that the bulk of those executed were Sunni jihadi
Salafists. Yet the rousing of dormant religious minorities in the Gulf, such as
its native Shi‘as, continues to fascinate those engaged in a politics of predic-
tion in the Gulf, as if only Shi‘ism could be the source of political change in a
region so dominated by Sunni orthodoxy.
Unlike the aftermath of 1979, however, the Gulf ’s monarchies are no
longer confronted by the spectre of theological revolution elsewhere, but by
forces that threaten the political order from within. I have outlined the clash
of ideas born out of such threats of violence that has acted like a solvent for
political certainties at a time when new political forms have not yet emerged
to replace those fatigued by their own indeterminacy. To characterise the
interregnum, I have presented voices that attempt to strike a balance between
the right and the good, and have hinted at the conceptual limitations that
saddle the audible strands of vernacular liberalism in their programmatic lan-
guage. Cumulatively, these impressions are meant to convey the ways in which
older political relationships yield to new ones, and that such a process of ideo-
logical transformation is irreducible to matters of political economy or politi-
cal Islam alone. This is because monarchs, militants and moderates may now
have to begin motivating allegiance to conceptions of sovereignty, statehood
and citizenship in new ways. None currently enjoy a monopoly on violence
and most likely realise that they may never secure one without some attempt
at reincarnation.
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ISLAMOTOPIA
Introduction
This chapter seeks to problematise a trend in which my own work has partici-
pated, and which has in fact been described by one reviewer as my work’s
‘central argument’.3 This chapter considers the discourse of ‘American Islam’:
the notion that American Muslims have created, or are in the process of creat-
ing, a uniquely American expression of Islam. The concept of ‘American Islam’
has been employed by a variety of Muslim intellectuals, including Republican
activists, promoters of interfaith dialogue, ‘Progressive Muslim’ leaders, advo-
cates for African American Muslim communities, Salafi revivalists, and schol-
219
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220
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221
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Islam rather than their specific national and cultural heritages, al-Faruqi
argued, they would reject the local innovations through which universal Islam
had been corrupted, restoring Islam to the purity of its foundational texts.6
Al-Faruqi wrote dismissively of Muslims who moved to the West for material
benefit, criticising what he called the ‘immigrant mentality’ as rooted in disgust
for the homeland and uncritical admiration for the new home. However, he
added that many Muslim immigrants who came for professional advancement
also ‘awakened’ themselves and ‘recaptured’ their Muslim selfhood while in
North America. In al-Faruqi’s view, these awakened Muslims could potentially
make North America the locus of a new Islamic revival that would transform
their host country: al-Faruqi outlined several ways in which ‘Islamic conscious-
ness’ acted upon the mind of the Muslim immigrant, including Islam’s capacity
for providing immigrants with ‘the deepest love, attachment, and aspiration for
a North America reformed and returned to God’.7 Whereas he had previously
emphasised the need for the global Muslim umma to retrieve scientific knowl-
edge from the West, he now wrote of North America obtaining ‘Islamic vision’
to complement its scientific and technological supremacy. What al-Faruqi called
‘Islamic vision’ would enable North America to ‘increase its mastery and use of
nature’, while disciplining this mastery with a sense of responsibility towards
God, humanity and other creatures.8
For al-Faruqi, the permanent settling of Muslim immigrants in North
America took on religious significance, through which Muslims shared in the
foundational mythic history of American origins:
[America] will not fail to recognize in the person with Islamic vision a true son,
though born overseas, whose spirit is nearly identical with that of the early founders
of the New World, who ran away from oppression and tyranny seeking a haven
where they would remold their lives under God, seek His bounty, and raise high
His banner.9
While connecting Muslim immigrants to the Anabaptist Pilgrim refugees
who first came to America, al-Faruqi also compared Muslim immigration to
the United States to the historic seventh-century migration (ḥijra) from
Mecca to Medina, through which Muḥammad and his companions estab-
lished the first Muslim society. The ḥijra comparison positioned transnational
Muslims as parallels to the Muḥājirūn, the Migrants. In this model, African
American Muslim communities would constitute the logical parallel to the
Muḥājirūn, the Anṣār (Helpers)—those who already lived in Medina and
welcomed the Muḥājirūn—though al-Faruqi’s focus on diasporic Muslim
communities does not extend his analogy to consider African Americans.
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require much effort on the part of both African American and transnational
Muslims. Pakistani academic Zafar Ishaq Ansari (1932–2016), who held
teaching positions in the United States and Canada, writes on African
American Muslim communities with attention to their prospects for tran-
scending their own ‘religio-cultural milieu’ and achieving authentic Islam.15 In
his assessment of the Nation of Islam, Ansari describes the NOI’s doctrines as
‘crude’, ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘unconvincing’, but nonetheless grants the NOI
a place in American Muslim history. Because it drew not from Islam but rather
‘the religious tradition of the Blacks’, Ansari writes, the NOI succeeded in
‘being not too foreign to its audience’ and thus provided an accessible ‘step-
ping-stone’ towards Islam.16
Ansari’s ‘Islam among African Americans: An Overview’ explicitly lays out
the conditions by which not only African American (‘indigenous’) but also
‘immigrant’ Muslims are to achieve a cohesive American Muslim community.
Ansari observes that what he terms ‘immigrant’ and ‘indigenous’ Muslim com-
munities have largely existed ‘in separate orbits’, but argues that they have
gradually moved towards deeper intersection, due to transformations on both
sides of the binary. On the immigrant side, Ansari attributes greater Muslim
unity to a ‘function of Americanization’: among the children and grandchil-
dren of Muslim immigrants, English has emerged as a first language, which
‘will be instrumental in solidifying Muslim ranks, since it enables them to have
effective communication’; and assimilation to the ‘American way of life—from
such trivialities as Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dunkin’ Donuts to the
nation’s more profound aspects.’17 Ansari asserts that ‘In the melting pot of the
United States, the edge of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural particularities of
immigrant Muslims has already begun to be blunted’, and compares this to the
processes by which Jewish and Catholic immigrants from different European
nations shed their diverse ethnic origins and became ‘simply Jews’ and ‘simply
Catholics’. Indigenous Muslims, in Ansari’s treatment, have contributed to
greater Muslim unity as a result of ‘increased upward mobility’ and by discard-
ing the ‘vogue of sectarianism and heterodoxy among a section of African
Americans’ that had previously divided them from immigrant Muslims.18 In
both groups, Ansari finds a lack of qualified Muslim intellectuals to guide
their communities. Immigrant communities, he writes, possess great scholars
who have made important contributions to the cause of Islam, but lack suffi-
cient fluency in English and cannot effectively communicate with children
who have been born and raised in the United States. Additionally, many
immigrant scholars bring ‘baggage from their home country’, which Ansari
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ISLAMOTOPIA
describes as ‘narrow, sectarian’, and ‘fairly rigid’; they cannot cater to American
Muslims’ specific needs or serve as representatives of Islam to the broader
American public.19 African American Muslim communities, meanwhile, ‘have
scarcely brought imams and religious leaders from abroad’, but have instead
‘appointed local persons from among themselves’ who generally lack legiti-
mate Islamic education.20 Ansari offers a biological determinist argument that
African American Muslims are indeed capable of becoming scholars, as ‘their
forefathers in Africa had made rich scholastic contributions’, including works
in Islamic sciences.21
In Ansari’s account, therefore, immigrant Muslims possess authentic Islam,
but must become more fully American by jettisoning the markers of their home-
land identities; indigenous Muslims are American, but must move up in socio-
economic class and also meet the immigrants’ standards of orthodoxy and
religious training. A cohesive American Muslim community is thus achieved
when both sides de-particularise their communities: immigrants must lose their
languages and homeland prejudices in America’s melting pot; indigenous
Muslims must abandon what Ansari calls their ‘Black-centeredness’ and embrace
‘Islamic universalism’, while also moving in from the margins of American life.
White converts, who are more privileged as fully American than both groups,
while also free from both the immigrants’ homeland prejudices and the ‘hetero-
doxy’ of African American communities, are not discussed by Ansari as having
any obstacles to overcome as contributors to American Islam.
Kenyan American scholar Ali A. Mazrui’s (1933–2014) ‘Muslims between
the Jewish Example and the Black Experience: American Policy Implications’
argues that there are actually ‘two Islams’ in the United States: the ‘indigenous’
and ‘immigrant’. Mazrui defines ‘indigenous’ as ‘people who have been
American for at least two centuries’; indigenous American Muslims, therefore,
are ‘mainly African Americans, with a small percentage of white Americans’.
He defines ‘immigrant’ Americans as ‘those who have been part of American
society for less than a century’. This category of ‘immigrants’, therefore,
includes the children and grandchildren of immigrants, regardless of where
they were born or even whether they had ever been outside the United States.
Repeating al-Faruqi, Mazrui describes immigrant Muslims as heirs to the
legacy of the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina.22 Like al-Faruqi,
Mazrui does not extend the hijra analogy to include African American
Muslims as heirs to the Anṣār.
Speculating on the future demographics of American Muslims, Mazrui
considers that antiterrorist legislation may restrict immigration from Muslim-
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ISLAMOTOPIA
as a ‘holy protest’, ‘cosmic “No”’, and ‘spontaneous folk orientation’ that pos-
sesses no theology, orthodoxy, institutions, foundational texts or even a spe-
cific god.28 What Black Americans embraced as ‘Islam’, according to Jackson,
was really Black religion at its core, with ‘Islam serving as the outer shell.’29 The
leaders of what he calls ‘proto-Islamic’ movements in the early twentieth cen-
tury were ‘not so much interpreting Islam as they were appropriating it … there
is little evidence that Noble Drew Ali or Elijah Muhammad knew much at all
about Islamic doctrine’.30
Jackson regards these ‘proto-Islamic’ leaders as pioneers of the first resur-
rection; this phase was eventually succeeded by the second resurrection, the
movement of Black American Muslims towards Sunni Islam. Despite its
greater claim to ‘orthodoxy’, the second resurrection retained the first resur-
rection’s reliance on charismatic leadership rather than mastery of tradition.
For Jackson, this era has had mixed results. Jackson regards Warith Deen
Mohammed, who had called for the development of a uniquely American
school of Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh), as ‘dogged by a perduring authority
deficit’ that has inhibited his ability to sustain a ‘positive expression of
American blackness that is recognized as being sufficiently “Islamic”’.31 As the
second resurrection era draws to a close, Jackson foresees the future of Islam
in Black America as ‘one in which the authenticating agent is almost certain
to be the structured discourse of Sunni Tradition’.32 It is in this third resurrec-
tion, Jackson argues, that Black American Muslims will finally achieve their
full authenticity as Black, American and Muslim. The third resurrection, in
his view, represents the Islam of Malcolm X, if Malcolm had survived into the
present: a Malcolm with the scholarly qualifications to articulate his position
as an American Muslim, affirming, ‘Yes, I am an American’ without endanger-
ing his Muslim legitimacy, since ‘he could now argue and show that such a
position was consistent with the best tradition of Sunni Islam’. This Malcolm
of an alternate universe would have performed the transition from ‘consumer’
to ‘producer’, contributing to a ‘properly constituted orthodox Islam in
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America’ and ‘leading the way in the transfer of Islamic religious authority
from immigrant to native-born hands’.33
Jackson does suggest that he prefers an ‘ecumenical American Islam’ over
‘the proliferation of monadic Blackamerican, white American, and Hispanic
Islams’, and recognises that white American Muslims ‘must also find ways to
come to terms with racism and other American realities without exposing
themselves to the charge of “cultural or ethnic apostasy”’.34 White converts
and other groups, which could potentially complicate the immigrant/black
American binary of Jackson’s narrative, do not receive significant discussion
in Islam and the Blackamerican. Jackson’s most salient insights regarding white
converts come in his argument against African American studies scholar
Molefi Asante’s claims in Afrocentricity that Blackamerican converts surrender
themselves to Arab cultural hegemony. ‘One should note that white American
Muslims change their names, perform the pilgrimage, turn to prayer, modify
their customs, and often replace their dress,’ Jackson writes; but Asante does
not charge these white converts with submitting to Arab culture or religion.
The difference, Jackson observes, is located in power relations: in Asante’s
experience, ‘whites simply do not have culture and religion imposed upon
them, certainly not by people of color’.35
The notion that labels such as ‘American Muslim’ or ‘Muslim American’ can
signify a coherent identity faces challenge from American academic Amina
Wadud (b.1952) in her essay, ‘American Muslim Identity: Race and Ethnicity
in Progressive Islam’. Wadud argues that the hyphenated ‘Muslim-American’
imagines a unity that has not yet been realised, obscuring and erasing ‘pro-
found and unreconciled differences … latent and overt ethnic and cultural
prejudices … and the hegemony of immigrant Muslim leadership and repre-
sentation in the American Muslim context’.36 Wadud also critiques the aca-
demic study of American Islam for its according priority to immigrants, as
evidenced in volumes such as Muslims on the Americanization Path. The
book’s title, she argues, automatically prioritises those for whom being Muslim
is presumed and becoming American is a matter of intention, while marginal-
ising African Americans, ‘for whom being American is presumed and
Islamization is the voluntary and intentional operation’.37 The chapter entitled
‘Americans towards Islamization,’ which exclusively discusses African
American Muslims, further marks ‘Islam’ as the domain of immigrants and
‘America’ as the domain of African Americans.
If both African American and transnational Muslims are discussed as
progressing towards an eventual telos of ‘American Islam’, one might ask
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how this American Islam is supposed to look. Here, we arrive at the dis-
course of ‘American Islam’ as a product that will not only fulfil the unique
needs of American Muslims but must urgently be exported to the rest of the
‘Muslim world’.
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ralism and gender equality.44 In turn, they advocate American Muslims pro-
moting and exporting American values to the transnational umma.45
In the Bush and Obama years, constructions of ‘American Islam’ have
emphasised Islam’s compatibility with popular American ideals of desirable
religiosity and constructions of gender. Moreover, this American Islam is pre-
sented as not only authentic in its religious claims but exceptionally authentic,
a more genuine expression of Islam than the entire ‘Muslim world’ can offer.
In the volume of essays entitled Taking Back Islam: American Muslims Reclaim
Their Faith (2002), for example, we find assertions such as ‘Islam in America
is probably closer to the true teachings of the Prophet Muhammad than any-
where else at any other time in the last five hundred years.’46 As American
sociologist Mitra Rastegar has observed, such claims draw attention away
from US interventions that have devastated Muslim-majority countries, as
well as the scrutiny and surveillance to which Muslims are subjected within
the United States.47
In ‘Living on Borderlines: Islam beyond the Clash and Dialogue’, American
academic M.A. Muqtedar Khan (b.1966) argues that while ‘the American
Muslim identity has not yet stabilized’, but remains highly contested, the expe-
rience of being Muslim in America has already ‘compelled American Muslims
to reimagine America and rethink their conceptions of the self ’. Amid this
reimagining, Khan argues, some American Muslims have started to develop a
‘third identity’. Though accused of ‘inventing an American Islam’, they are
proud to be both American and Muslim. These American Muslims, Khan
suggests, are characterised by idealism, respect for human rights, concern for
animals and the environment, economic and political liberalism, social con-
servatism, belief in freedom of religion and equal rights for all religious and
ethnic minorities, self-awareness of their ‘economic and political privileges’,
and hope for creating a ‘model Muslim community’ that would guide both
Muslim-majority and Western societies. For the advocates of this third iden-
tity, the ‘relative opportunity’ to practise Islam and establish Muslim institu-
tions within the United States, compared with the ‘presently autocratic
Muslim world’, constitutes the ‘most thrilling aspect of American life’.
Celebrating this opportunity, Khan argues, American Muslims ‘dream of mak-
ing changes in Muslim attitudes as well as Muslim conditions so that their
fellow Muslims can also learn the bliss of practicing Islam by choice and with-
out any fear of the state or a dominant group’.48
The idealisation of a uniquely American Muslim identity, tradition and
worldview—necessarily seen as impossible within, and liberated from, the
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
One of the contributors to Living Islam Out Loud, Khalida Saed, offers
reflections on what she presents as her tripartite identity of queer, American
and Muslim. Saed came out to her Iranian immigrant mother at fourteen, and
attributed her courage to do so to the ‘American’ side of her identity: ‘I’m not
sure I would have had the balls to discuss my sexuality at all, or even consider
it, if my American side hadn’t told me I had the right.’ Saed’s experience would
alienate her from Islam until she encountered progressive Muslim communi-
ties. Saed defines ‘Progressive Islam’ as rooted in the belief that concern for
social justice and opposition to discrimination are core Islamic values, while
also naming this formulation as ‘the branch of Islam that is distinctly
American’. The bridging of her Muslim identity to her American identity
simultaneously rescues Islam from her identity as Iranian: ‘I realize that a lot
of what I had been attributing to Islam is really a byproduct of my own cul-
ture. Patriarchy and sexism are not necessarily Islamic traits but are actually
cultural traits. Realizing this has allowed me to give religion another chance.’50
Saed’s differentiation between religion and culture, while resonating with
al-Faruqi’s vision of the United States as a place where Muslims could become
culture-free and purify Islam, can serve to privilege American Muslim perspec-
tives as taking place above and beyond culture. This is exemplified in the work
of Republican author and self-identified ‘Muslim feminist cowgirl’, Asma Gull
Hasan (b.1974). A member of the Hasan family that established the ‘Muslims
for Bush’ organisation, Hasan has authored two books, Why I Am a Muslim
and American Muslims: the Next Generation, and worked internationally as a
representative of the US State Department. For Hasan, American Islam
amounts to a ‘new version of Islam’ that arises when Muslim immigrants from
various cultures ‘mix’ with American converts.51 This mixture of cultures, she
argues, will produce its own hermeneutic: Hasan defines ‘American Islam’
specifically as ‘a return to the Qur’an without the influence of pre-Islamic
Arab culture’.52 Hasan then expands the problem of ‘culture’ to include not
only pre-Islamic jahiliyya, but the diverse national backgrounds of Muslim
immigrants. As mosques in the United States are likely to serve diverse popu-
lations, Hasan suggests, cultural differences will inevitably be washed away in
favour of ‘the only guidance they have that is not culturally biased: the
Qur’an’.53 Like al-Faruqi, Hasan marks cultural diversity as an obstacle to
achieving scripturally authenticated Islam, and looks to a Muslim melting pot
in the United States as the solution: a Muslim community with no culture,
only texts. ‘As a result,’ she writes, ‘I believe American Islam is a purer form of
Islam than is practiced in some Islamic countries, because of the absence of
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235
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Conclusion
Islam does not require us to abandon our own culture for an alien culture in order
to be Muslim. That is unacceptable cultural hegemony … ‘Islam in America’ is its
own entity, and it has to emerge as an indigenous cultural phenomenon rooted in
the religion’s permanent spiritual and ethical realities that are not subject to change,
irrespective of time or place.
Hamza Yusuf, Facebook post, 25 April 201472
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ISLAMOTOPIA
The above post from Yusuf ’s public Facebook page expresses a careful nego-
tiation with the idea of ‘American Islam’. Yusuf allows the possibility of an
Islam that is ‘indigenous’ to America, in contrast to the demands of an unspec-
ified ‘alien culture’. However, Yusuf also insists that the indigenous American
Islam must remain in conformity to a timeless, historically consistent Islam
that stands beyond human culture. The assertion that true Islam transcends
cultural particularities requires that no pre-existing homeland traditions are
to be privileged in formulating American Islam. While resisting the ‘cultural
hegemony’ that might be imposed upon American Muslims by ‘alien’ actors,
Yusuf opens American Islam to an alternate hegemony, to be determined by
those who hold proper claims on both Americanness and Islam.
Yusuf ’s oppositions of the indigenous to the alien and the religious to the
cultural would resonate with visions of American Islam as offered by a wide
spectrum of Muslims, many of whom disagree dramatically with Yusuf as to
where these lines are to be drawn. In response to the above Facebook post, Ani
Zonneveld posted, ‘Nice speech from a man who changed his name, not to
mention adopting clothing etc from one of Arab tradition.’73
As opposed to the ‘alien’ practices of immigrant-led communities,
Zonneveld insists that a purely American Islam, more firmly grounded in
domestic traditions, ‘would have easily won over the hearts and minds of the
masses’. This means that in Zonneveld’s argument, African American Muslim
communities ought to have performed the work of Americanising Islam, but
have failed to do so. Zonneveld concludes that the necessary Americanisation
of Islam only follows precedents found throughout the umma, in which every
modern state apparently produces its own self-contained and hermetically
sealed variant of Islam within its borders: ‘There’s a Malaysian Islam, a
Pakistani Islam and a Chinese Islam,’ she argues. ‘Why not an American
Islam?’74 The consequences of her argument are (1) that this American Islam
will be a singular entity, the discourses, practices and norms of which will be
determined primarily by its relationship to the American state; (2) if a unique
‘Pakistani Islam’ actually exists but American Islam does not, we are to assume
that this Pakistani Islam is too inescapably foreign to suffice as American Islam
for anyone, including Pakistani American communities; (3) African American
Muslim communities and narratives, having been infected with the contagion
of Arab influence, are also inadequate.
Reflections upon ‘American Islam’ as a distinct tradition or possible future,
treating both halves of that construction as measurable states of being, have
pathologised African American and transnational Muslim communities as lack-
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
ing authenticity in one category or the other, and often both. These discourses
widely represent African American Muslims as struggling to overcome ‘hetero-
dox’ traditions, lack of qualified religious scholarship, and an anti-Islamic fixa-
tion on race to earn recognition as ‘real’ Muslims, while immigrant Muslims are
imagined as gradually assimilating to become ‘real’ Americans. Simultaneously,
however, African American Muslims are often denied the privilege of being fully
American, with representations of conversion emphasising social marginalisa-
tion, poverty and political radicalism, while their attempts to become legitimate
Muslims through Saudi-influenced networks potentially undo their claims to
authentic Americanness. Immigrant Muslims are in turn denied credibility as
bearers of authentic Islam when homeland practices are perceived as riddled
with heretical innovations and ‘cultural’ interference.75 They are tasked with
assimilating not only to broader American society but also to the diversity and
new rules of authenticity in American mosques.
In such treatments, the hypothetical ‘American Islam’ is presented as attain-
able only when everyone universalises. For African American Muslims, this
means transcending the ‘holy protest’ of ‘Black Religion’, leaving behind the
legacy of ‘proto-Islamic’ movements such as the Nation of Islam and Moorish
Science Temple, and somehow becoming simultaneously more American and
more global. For transnational Muslims, this means abandoning homeland
languages, dissolving their national backgrounds within an American Muslim
‘melting pot’, and rejecting traditional practices that have been marked as
un-Islamic, thus arriving at ‘pure’ and cultureless Islam (as defined in American
Muslim institutions). For this ideal of ‘American Islam’ to be realised, ‘black’
must become less Black, ‘foreign’ must become less foreign (or, as Zonneveld’s
advice to African American Muslims demonstrates, ‘Black’ and ‘foreign’ can
preserve their uniqueness in ways determined acceptable by outsiders) and
everyone must become more authentically ‘Muslim’.
Largely absent from these discourses are considerations of white converts.
The immediate explanation for this would be that in comparison to African
American and immigrant Muslims, white converts lack numerical signifi-
cance; nor is there a self-evident ‘white Muslim community’ or network of
‘white mosques’. This response is reasonable, and attention to Latino Muslims
and other identities becomes even more difficult to find in the ‘American
Islam’ conversation. However, I would suggest that even as white converts
have been largely ignored in analyses of American Muslim communities,
whiteness remains consistently present in formulations of American Islam in
ways that privilege white converts as its most desirable representatives.
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239
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
United States as having ‘the best anti-discriminatory laws on the planet,’ asser-
tions that ‘The police aren’t all racist’, and the complaint, ‘It actually makes me
a little sick to my stomach to see all these people rising up about … white privi-
lege’). Yusuf ’s remarks provoked an array of responses throughout online
Muslim media, including criticisms that he was ‘clueless’ about systematic
racism and functionally a white supremacist himself.80
Just a month later, amid mass protests accompanying the presidential inau-
guration of Donald Trump, artist Shepard Fairey produced and disseminated
a new American Muslim icon: a portrait, presented in the style that Fairey
made famous with his Obama ‘Hope’ icon, of a woman of South Asian heritage
wearing the United States flag as her hijab. Muslim and American identities
now achieve their confluence at the body of a Muslim woman whose hijab and
unflinching stare into the camera simultaneously project both a confident
expression of her Muslim selfhood and an assertion of her rightful home within
the American empire. Fairey’s icon of faith and citizenship, based on a 2007
photograph for Muslim magazine Illume, reverberates a prominent theme of
the 2016 presidential election: the right to full Americanness of an immigrant
Muslim family that sacrifices its son to the US military (in turn echoing Colin
Powell, who addressed the ‘Muslim question’ during Obama’s 2008 campaign
by referring to a Muslim soldier’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery).
Transforming the material expression of American exceptionalism into gen-
dered Muslim embodiment (and vice versa) presents American Islam as so
secure in both its Muslim authenticity and embrace of US nationalism that the
two become mutually coherent and inseparable, each serving an operation of
the other. With his icon of a brown Muslim woman literally wrapped in pious
patriotism, Fairey, a non-Muslim white man, fulfils decades of Muslim dis-
courses that envision the best Muslim as also the truest American.
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12
Sadia Abbas
Intimacies
243
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
244
PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON ART AND SOCIETY
or perhaps aesthetics at large, give us Islamophobia. Along the way, Asad wrote
passages such as the following:
Modernism—the aesthetics accompanying modernity—engages with powerful
feelings of visceral disgust. And it is in mimesis that modernism finds one of the
most potent sources of revulsion and of paranoia, revulsion because modernism
values only independence of judgment and despises imitation, paranoia because
modernism seeks to penetrate disguises that make things (people, action, words)
appear normal and innocent and shows them to be really meaningful and
hostile.3
Although these lines do not indicate any serious engagement with modern-
ism—their ostensible referent—they do work symptomatically to betray (or
elicit) an antipathy to aesthetics. It is not possible here to reflect at length on the
passage’s presentation of modernism, but as a quick example it is worth pointing
out that such a description cannot account for T.S. Eliot’s notion of tradition in
an essay like ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, his fascination with pre-Ref-
ormation Christianity as manifested in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ or even his
Anglo-Catholicism. My point is not to defend a high modernist such as Eliot,
but to ask whether such accounts serve any identifiable purpose.4
A more explicit antipathy to aesthetics can be found in Mahmood’s 2006
essay, ‘Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation’,
in which she argues that the ‘hermeneutic of secularism’, which is a hermeneu-
tic of empire, is (perhaps fatally) imbricated with an ‘aesthetic sensibility’
overly reliant on Judeo-Christian poetic resources and fundamentally opposed
to religious sensibilities. Mahmood identifies those who have such a sensibility
as ‘cavorting with empire’.5
Discussions such as those of Modood and Asad in the 1980s and 1990s
regarding Britain’s failure to integrate its Muslim immigrants, and the way in
which such failures have revolved around literature and aesthetics, having
crossed the Euro-American divide, have expanded and hybridised. What has
emerged is a suspicion of aesthetics that can now be located squarely in the US
academy in the 2000s. Since the discussions remain framed within a context
where majoritarian sentiment is non-Muslim, and, in some cases, explicitly
hostile to Islam, ‘Muslim’ itself seems to have become a category of alterity—
seeming, in fact, permanently so. As a result, a Muslim majority, real in many
parts of the world, seems inconceivable within the conceptual frames put
forward by such writers.
Although it does not engage directly with the history of aesthetics, the new
anthropology of Islam relies on critiques of Enlightenment and Romantic
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thinkers and accepts their claims in its general dismissal of aesthetics.6 In other
words, it accepts an identification of the author and artist with the free and
autonomous subject, and of art and aesthetic performance as only constituted
by the endless drama of the paradoxes generated by Western conceptions of
freedom. At the same time, this new anthropology participates in a conversa-
tion in which Islam is construed as a problem for Europe, and is, in the pro-
cess, turned into a flashpoint for a confrontation with the crisis of the very
idea of Europe.
However, the accounts of the arts and literature implicit in such critiques
of literature and the ‘aesthetic sensibility’ are overly focused on, and located
within, the realm of Western liberal reception. Moreover, their overreliance,
even if only in a negative delineation, on Enlightenment and Romantic
notions of aesthetics and the subject has a question-begging quality, seeming
to prohibit a more engaged and socially embedded understanding of art, in
which art, aesthetics and literature are not simply abstractions to be invoked
in the service of liberal and conservative self-congratulation, or left and anti-
liberal excoriation, but can instead be seen as complex participants in the
production of society.
The performances, poems and paintings referred to here may or may not
slot into ongoing meditations on the history of (post-)Enlightenment aesthet-
ics, but making them fit, or conversely, demonstrating their dramatic, contras-
tive distinctness is not the aim of this essay. To the extent that studies of
aesthetics seek to bring all meditation on aesthetic objects and performances
into the line of this aesthetic genealogy, they seem primed to become reflec-
tions on the crisis of Europe, stuck within a cycle of accusation, defence and
even despair; they seem to bring, perhaps inadvertently, every conversation
into a referendum on the idea of Europe, which is in turn a reflection on the
idea of the integrity and superiority of the idea of Europe, of which the United
States, through the notion of ‘the West’, is an extension.
Yet, when one shifts to the postcolonial context of Pakistan, perhaps the
Enlightenment question that obtains most is the problem of the nation-state.
Focusing on it as the apparatus for organising society that has tremendous
consequences for historic life worlds enables a reorientation of some of the
predispositions of current discussions of aesthetics and modern Islam. The
performances and art discussed here open up the relationship of art to the
state and to society in a way that enables some understanding of the intricate
relation between history, aesthetic production and performance, and the
apparatus of structures and discourses of power. For, even as certain perfor-
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Finality
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other words, the final prophet, which is also translatable as the seal of the
prophets. The refrain formally reinforces this finality as it closes every couplet,
ending every new plea or list of attributes. Here are two exemplary couplets
from the performance:
Cast a magnanimous glance my way, O intercessor for humanity, seal of the proph-
ets [the final prophet]
You are the light of eternity, you are the flame of the haram [Kaaba], you are the
bright sun, seal of the prophets.
You wear the crown that God would not have created the world but for you, you
alone have the distinction of the meraj [the visit to heaven]
Islam’s honour is because of you, O prophet Mustafa, seal of the prophets.
Yet strict Sunni Muslims belonging to certain groups (and often called
Wahhabis in a general way) consider even such devotional forms shirk or
idolatry, and such practices, which predominate among another group called
the Barelvis, who are particularly associated with devotion to Muhammad,
require increasing defence from their adherents.9 At the same time, this devo-
tional poem foregrounds a different problem, for its celebratory refrain is
based on the doctrinal proposition that Muhammad is the last of the proph-
ets, which is now central to the status and persecution of minorities in
Pakistan. So, shifting discursive and formal registers somewhat, I quote from
the second amendment to the Pakistani Constitution of 1973. As is well
known, the amendment specifically targets the Ahmadiyya, whose origins,
indigenous to South Asia, lie in nineteenth-century Punjab. The sect considers
itself Muslim, but is said not to recognise that Muhammad is the last Prophet:
A person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of The
Prophethood of Muhammad (Peace be upon him), the last of the Prophets or claims
to be a Prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after
Muhammad (Peace be upon him), or recognizes such a claimant as a Prophet or
religious reformer, is not a Muslim for the purposes of the Constitution or the law.10
With this amendment, it is clear that the objections of Muhammad Iqbal,
the ‘spiritual father’ of Pakistan, to the Ahmadis and his insistence on the
finality of prophethood securing the boundaries of Islam have entered into the
apparatus of the state, with substantial help from the late head of the Islamist
Jamaat-e-Islami party Abul Ala Mawdudi and his followers. As Iqbal puts it,
‘the integrity of Muslim society is secured by the Finality of Prophethood
alone’ and Islam ‘cannot reconcile itself with a movement that threatens its
present solidarity and promises of further rifts in human society’.11 The objec-
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PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON ART AND SOCIETY
tions Iqbal refined and certified surface in the amendment quoted above, as
well as in two amendments of the Pakistan Penal Code and identity card and
passport applications, in which Pakistanis are required to sign a statement
saying that people who do not believe in the finality of prophethood are not
Muslims. The attestation to the proposition is, in other words, a requirement
of citizenship.
How this requirement is experienced may be evident in this brief excerpt
from a speech delivered by Asiya Nasir, a Christian member of Pakistan’s
National Assembly, upon the death of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Christian minority
affairs minister, murdered in the agitation that followed a bid to repeal
Pakistan’s blasphemy law: ‘We know very well how to respect the final prophet
and protect his honour. No minority could even imagine insulting the glory
of any prophet.’12
Elsewhere in the speech, Nasir asks whether Pakistan is only a country for
Muslims, as she says some ‘extremist’ journalists are suggesting, and whether
Christians need to take up residence elsewhere.13 Muslim notions of respect
for the people of the book rely on the narrative that Muhammad completes
history and supersedes the prophets who have preceded him—in other words,
on the idea that other prophets are part of a prior history conceived as Muslim
through an understanding of Islam as their teleological end. That a Christian
feels obliged to assert this doctrine of finality in a speech raising the spectre of
ethnic or, more precisely, religious cleansing reveals the great proximity and
terrible tension in which the na’t, the speech and the amendments exist.
The beautiful refrain of the poem, powerfully disseminated on the airwaves,
is also the frame of a current problem of the state.14 The state defamiliarises the
refrain, revealing the propositional element in its proud celebration, remind-
ing us at the same time of how this veneration of the Prophet can quickly turn
into an instrument of the law. As the web of connections and references I have
laid out suggests, and as I have argued at some length elsewhere, the doctrine
of the finality of prophethood—fully entangled with religious affect and
Muhammad devotion—has become a mode of securing the conceptual
boundaries of the Pakistani state, as well as being one of the movers of state-
regulated persecution and para-state carnage.15
Conceptions of an ‘aesthetic sensibility’ as the putative other of an uncon-
taminated Islam enable little by way of understanding the combination of
devotional aesthetics and practice and affective community, which is also, in
the case of Pakistan, the name of a violent fracture. Even as the state enshrines
the proposition of finality, derived from habits of religious devotion, in the
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A painting such as Unver Shafi’s The Two Souzas (6′ x 5′, oil on canvas, 2009,
fig. 12.1) is hard to assimilate to the problem I have laid out. Yet it inhabits
the same society and circulates within the same polity as the na’t. After all, it
is not uncommon for people from the middle and upper middle class to
attend a milad (a gathering in celebration of the Prophet’s birth at which na’ts
are recited), go to an art gallery or collect such a painting. Moreover, given
the success of institutions like the National College of Arts in attracting
students from different classes, art is becoming more accessible across class
lines, ironically at the same time as it is increasingly imbricated in a global
economy of collection.
The Two Souzas is a painting that confronts the viewer with its powerful
opacity. Distant from the ‘realist’ language of pictorial illusionism and repre-
sentation, the painting does not have a recognisable iconography and seems
designed to evade all semiotic stability and thus to be resistant to all discursive
structures. The bold forms of the large oil appear to defy origin and be in the
process of perpetual transformation; the latent shapes, which are both care-
fully defined and seem to be collapsing into themselves, appear ready to break
out from the under the ‘surface’ of the deceptively tranquil monochromatic
canvas. The blue of the painting invites the viewer to dive in, or refers back to
so many blues, Moroccan, Turkish, Persian, implying that even colours are
signs, conventional to the core, and that I am wrong to suggest that the paint-
ing can indeed evade being understood through discursive structures—even
as its suggesting these associations reveals the arbitrariness of such a system,
dependent as it is on the viewer’s perception and the reliance of such percep-
tion on the perceiver’s visual knowledge. Such knowledge may not help in
reading the yellow-brown version of the same image (Homage to Souza, 6′ x
5′, oil on canvas, 2012), for that colour does not appear to have a set of name-
able aesthetic associations. This is unsurprising, for Shafi says that he set out
to paint a colour that was difficult to place, although he was interested in the
khaki he saw in company paintings. When pressed to name the colour, he
describes it as a ‘grey toned form washed in umber giving the darker parts the
greenish tint’.17
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PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON ART AND SOCIETY
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
The painting’s opacity (the way in which the shape(s) fold over, sinking into
and rising out of their own blueness, seeming to militate against any possibil-
ity of division as they deny the cleavage of the two panels in the diptych) and
its homage to Souza gesture across the border, refusing to let the state project
and the violent history of Partition set the parameters of aesthetic community
or of perception and affect. Form, reference and homage converge to become
border-crossing gestures, aligning a temporal disruption with a spatial one.
The division in the diptych plays with the clarity of division and of proposi-
tion by drawing a line through the remarkably infolded image. The fundamen-
tal formal reference to, in Shafi’s own words, ‘a common pictorial history’,
pushes against the violence of the cartography of Partition and the historical
finality that borders seek to secure.19
The border-crossing gesture, present in both the painting’s form and its
title, is of a piece with Shafi’s work in the Fabulist series, painted with acrylics,
a series that plays with the idea of the miniature in the scale of the paintings
(usually 6′′ x 6′′ to 18′′ x 18′′), as compared with the oils, which tend to be
quite large, ranging from 3′ x 4′ to 8′ x 7′. At the same time, these paintings
push against the state project in a different way, by reaching into regional
aesthetics and forms—a pointillism that seems inspired by fabric dying and
embroidery methods such as chunri and makaish, references to Hindu sculp-
ture, a colour palette drawn from the Thar Desert or Rajasthan.
The Proposal (15” x 15”, acrylic on canvas, 2009, fig. 12.2) and Desi Wedding
(15” x 15”, acrylic on canvas, 2012, fig. 12.3) present a dark eroticism and seem
more obviously consonant with the hyper-sexualised imagery of Souza’s cor-
pus, even though Shafi’s emphasis on beauty, and ornament and (complicated)
joy in colour is very distinct. ‘Complicated’ is particularly apt in the context
of Desi Wedding because, in that painting, colour itself seems complicit in the
collapse the image figures, as shapes suggesting tongues and penises seem at
the same time merely to be vividly colourful fabric patterns. In its combina-
tion of erotic violence and flashy colouring, the painting makes ‘desi’ weddings
themselves seem like intensely coloured and overwrought events of highly
metamorphic invasion.
In The Anecdote of a Cat (18” x 18”, acrylic on canvas, 2014, fig. 12.4), these
visual elements are brought into play in the service of an almost naïve visual
world of children’s storytelling and fable—the fish is now part of the cat and
visually inseparable from it. Such playfulness is consistent with Shafi’s ten-
dency to collapse the borders between shapes and objects in his work, indicat-
ing his interest in metamorphosis and transformation, which has a profound
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
effect on his formal habits and affinities. At the same time, it is a reminder that
a space like Pakistan, now entirely constituted by Islam in the Western imagi-
nation, in segments of the Pakistani consciousness, and certainly also in the
state’s conception of its citizenry, has all sorts of activity and interest that have
little to do with it, even if such activity and performance can be invisible
within current intellectual configurations.
Inverted iconographies
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exemplary instance of the formation I have called Cold War Baroque.20 Cold
War Baroque is an aesthetic formation that emerged in response to the cultiva-
tion by American and Saudi Arabian anti-communist and various third-world
nationalist and postcolonial praetorian governments of intensely iconoclastic
and anti-aesthetic brands of Islam. It is marked by the use of iconic theological
ideas and narratives and varieties of profoundly visual iconicism. It is preoc-
cupied with the layering of devotional and theological ideas and of the torn
and suffering body and is often characterised by ornateness. The term can
apply to the novelist Mohammed Hanif ’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti and much
of Nadeem Aslam’s corpus. Here, I will focus on three paintings by Aijazuddin.
Although he is a young painter, Aijazuddin’s body of work already provides
a remarkably sustained reflection on the very idea of iconography. In some of
his earlier paintings, such as the very poignant altarpiece The First Majlis
(29.9” x 46”, acrylic and oil on panel, 2011, fig. 12.5), Aijazuddin blurs the
lines between the Abrahamic religions by combining the frame of the altar-
piece with visual imaginings of scenes from early Muslim history. The symbol-
ism of various traditions is powerfully juxtaposed, leading to unexpected
fusions calling upon Renaissance, Byzantine and a variety of Muslim tradi-
tions of design, ornamentation and narrative. The First Majlis, for instance,
cites the compositions of Renaissance triptychs and the dark colours and
exaggerated movement of line in body, fabric and gesture of Baroque and
Mannerist painting, painted in a consciously anachronistic manner. Aijazuddin’s
breadth of pictorial reference, and his deployment of iconographies that are
both excessive and inverted, work against a state apparatus characterised by
control of iconographies and an attitude towards history that is marked by a
profound need to produce a social structure determined by the privative, in
which identities and narratives that gesture towards a pre-Partition history are
controlled and erased.
Aijazuddin’s Zia paintings, a series in each of which Zia-ul-Haq’s portrait
forms a focal point, might as well be called Nation and Icon, for they figure the
military dictator Zia-ul-Haq as iconic to some in the country, even as to others
he is a reviled figure. More modern in composition than the earliest altar-
pieces, these six paintings (at least two of which are displayed on his website)
present a dark and visually striking vision of power in the nation. Although
the execution of the graphite portrait is disembodied and the graphite less
emphatic than the red acrylic, in each of the 4-by-4 foot paintings, the much
larger than life head of Zia in the background seems powerfully present, an
authorising figure dominating, or even haunting, the world of the painting.
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
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The red acrylic wash recalls Shakir Ali’s work, which Aijazuddin was sur-
rounded by in his youth (since his family owns a number of these paintings)
and, at the same time, makes the paintings seem bathed in blood.
In Flagellation (4′ x 4′, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2011, fig. 12.6), positioned
at an angle in the front right foreground is a man tied to wooden beams that
form a cross, being flogged by a policeman. The two policemen behind are closer
to Zia’s face. One seems almost to be carrying a book of laws or rules. It appears
official, and he officious. The three policemen and the man being flogged seem
more embodied as they are painted in oils—almost as if in this blood-bathed
environment only the torturer and the tortured can be given their fully embod-
ied form. The representation of the flogging is based on a photograph taken after
the Hudood Ordinances—in effect, a series of vice laws—were put in place by
Zia-ul-Haq.21 The painting calls on the feature of icons that relies on the inter-
play between word and image; the name encourages an openness to linguistic
association as well. The opening up of a connection between the Roman
Imperial Guard and the militaristic apparatus—of which Zia was a product and
which he did much to strengthen—is precisely such an association. Though the
word praetorian is not used, it is implied by the iconographic tradition made
available by the titular reference to ‘flagellation’, which simultaneously fore-
grounds the Christic element and (along with the cross) implicitly connects the
Hudood Ordinances with the ‘blasphemy’ laws that have come to govern the
life of Pakistan’s minorities and particularly its Christians.
State of Affairs (4′ x 12′, mixed media mounted on antique wooden balcony,
2014, fig. 12.7), painted a few years later, extends the question of nation and
icon in another direction: What happens when one puts the founder next to
an aspect of that which was founded? In the four-panel painting, Aijazuddin
turns his iconographic preoccupations to more overtly parodic use. Jinnah’s
almost full-length portrait is placed in the second panel, flanked in the first,
third and fourth by scenes of sex, violence and one floating portrait of a schol-
arly girl, angled in such a way that that they exude chaos and clutter while at
the same time suggesting the choreography of fashion magazine spreads. The
dress and demeanour of the figures shows them to be upper class. The alam,
the hand of Fatima, brandished on a stick like a weapon in a medieval joust,
horizontally cutting across two of the panels, is free of its religious iconic
content, as is the crescent and star, here clearly lifted from the Pakistani flag,
made into context-less signs and visually equivalent to the floating and snaky
showerhead in the fourth panel. The painting combines the melting and dis-
integrating halos (the halo is one of Aijazuddin’s favourite visual motifs) with
these excessive and almost violently context-less icons.
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Devotion
In the very popular qawwali, performed by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Tum Ek
Gorakh Dhanda Ho (You are one tricky business), the breadth of prophetic
and religio-poetic reference is large. Prophets from the three Abrahamic faiths
and Muhammad’s martyred grandson Husain are mentioned; allusions are
made to heroic lovers of Sufi significance such as Shams, Sarmad, Qais/
Majnun, Ranjha, Sohni, Mahiwal and Sassi.22 The lyrics are replete with his-
torical paradox and irony, as the poetic lover addresses God in an affectionate
intimacy, employing the performative conceit that the intimacy of love gives
the speaker/lover the right to marvel ironically at his ways, all combined
within the context of a celebration of the wonder of Allah’s ineffability (‘You
are your own veil’).
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PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON ART AND SOCIETY
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Complicity
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Muhammad and that, at the very least, this na’t should be eschewed as a form?
Nonetheless, it must be said that despite its imbrication in a very troubling
juridical sphere, the na’t retains its beauty, which is an effect both of its rendi-
tion and of the way in which both in the poem and, in such performances as
Umm-e-Habiba’s, prayer is turned into lyric. Moreover, a gathering such as a
milad can be characterised by great beauty, festivity and is very much part of
Muslim South Asian life worlds. Devotion to Muhammad is, of course, central
to their constitution. Yet, such life worlds both overlap and sit in tension with
other forms of South Asian and, specifically, Pakistani belonging and sociality.
Thus devotion to Muhammad is also complicit with a dark juridical sphere.
Does this complicity, then, necessitate that these life worlds be shattered? For
how are such sensibilities to be transformed without the breaking of the life
worlds they help constitute?
On the other hand, a painting such as Shafi’s Two Souzas (whose painter
manifests an unselfconscious class privilege and has so far demonstrated little
interest in overcoming the very intense class hierarchies of Pakistan) is more
readily intelligible than the na’t as ‘elite’ and as part of a rather protected
sphere of cultural activity.27 It makes its way into the collections of rich people,
clearly vigorous beneficiaries of neoliberal economies, but yet has an unstable
place in relation to the state project—as do paintings such as The First Majlis,
Flagellation and State of Affairs. Despite State of Affairs having been purchased
by the young political dynast Bilawal Bhutto, the painting and Aijazuddin’s
corpus in general manifest an unease with the class structures of the nation.
The state, on the other hand, is fully implicated in neoliberalism, which con-
tinues to consolidate and exacerbate those very structures.
The connections, overlaps and tensions laid out above are complex, yet the
performances and objects I have described are neither reducible to their mate-
rial conditions nor separable from them. They both contribute to the social
situation, shaping its materiality, pulling their performers, creators, and audi-
ences into crisscrossing communities, and elude and sometimes resist the
structures—including the ones that they themselves might summon into
being—that constitute the social situation. At the same time, their intersec-
tions and resonances call into question discourses regarding Islam that slice up
society along neatly religious and secular lines in order to critique, and perhaps
even transcend, a variety of liberal positions. That such discourses unwittingly
reproduce the divisions assumed by the very liberal thinking motivating the
critique is merely one of the ironies of the current intellectual moment. The
sometimes counterintuitive connections that I have sought to make visible in
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
this essay cut against the grain of such a bifurcated way of conceptualising
society. Rethinking the relationship between varieties of aesthetic perfor-
mance along less schematic lines enables a less truncated and more vigorous
conception of society—alienating aesthetics from which does little to enable
an understanding of society or sociality. Paying closer attention to how aes-
thetic production constitutes the society may, however, enable a more intricate
understanding of the tensions, contradictions and intimacies of the current
social situation, whether of Muslim minorities in the ‘West’ or of the popula-
tions in Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan.
262
13
Edward E. Curtis IV
Known for its radical resistance to white supremacy, US foreign policy, black
Christianity and the liberal dream of racial integration, Elijah Muhammad’s
Nation of Islam (NOI) was a prime target of US governmental surveillance
and repression. Its very presence was perceived as a threat to the ideological
foundations of 1960s US liberalism, which rested on anti-communism and
the suppression of political dissent both at home and abroad, on the rhetoric
of equal rights under the law and sometimes racial integration, and on federal
welfare programmes.1 Instead, the Nation of Islam advocated racial separa-
tism, black capitalism, Afro-Asian solidarity and a cultural and religious iden-
tity that revolved around its unique understanding of Islam. Often aligning
themselves, like other African American radicals in the 1960s, against US
intervention in Africa and Asia, Nation of Islam members imagined them-
selves in solidarity with non-aligned leaders, especially the Egyptian president,
Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The story of this small but important American movement is so ‘marginal’
to the history of modern Islam that it also exposes the ‘vital centre’ of Muslim
263
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
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ELIJAH MUHAMMAD’S NOI
After the Second World War, Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam emerged out
of a pack of associations and movements founded during the interwar period
to become the most popular expression of black American Islam.4 Like most
other African American Muslims groups, whether Sunni, Ahmadi or Moorish
in religious orientation, the politics of the Nation of Islam linked the struggle
for black dignity, freedom and self-determination in the United States to the
struggle of people of colour abroad. The 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in
Bandung, Indonesia, was a signal event for the group’s most powerful political
theorist, Malcolm X. As the chief spokesperson for the movement’s prophetic
leader, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X drew out the radical elements of its
theology and doctrine, fusing them with third world non-alignment. He posi-
tioned the organisation as the US vanguard of the global movement not only
to eschew colonial and neocolonial political control but also to rid people of
colour of a colonised consciousness.5 Unlike many black radicals who saw an
alternative in communism, however, Malcolm X and his teacher, Elijah
Muhammad, identified Islam as the solution to such problems.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Nation of Islam members would debate, define
and engender this revolutionary notion of Islam in different ways. At least
some members, especially Malcolm X, identified Gamal Abdel Nasser, the
revolutionary leader of the United Arab Republic (the combined state of Egypt
and Syria), as a model of Islamic engagement. Like others around the world,
many African American Muslims and African American leftists more generally
hailed Nasser’s weathering of the Suez Crisis in 1956. Some members hung
pictures of him in their homes.6 In 1958, the year in which the UAR was
formed and Nasser convened a meeting of the Afro-Asian Conference in
Cairo, Elijah Muhammad cabled Nasser to seek his support for the group in
the United States. In words that seem to have been crafted by Malcolm X, he
urged Nasser to see their movements as branches of the same tree: ‘Freedom,
justice, and equality for all Africans and Asians is of far-reaching importance,
not only to you of the East, but also to over 17,000,000 of your long-lost broth-
ers of African-Asian descent here in the West.’ While Nasser may have been
seen as a threat to the vision of the political Islam advocated by the Muslim
Brothers and eventually the Muslim World League, for some in Nation of Islam
he was the perfect embodiment of the politically engaged Muslim.
The symbolic link between the Nation of Islam and Nasser was so strong by
the late 1950s that it prompted Thurgood Marshall, counsel for the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and future
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
Triumph the Church of the New Age, both based out of Chicago.9
Though Elijah Muhammad may or may not have been associated with these
groups, he did oppose African American participation in the Second World
War based partly on the claim that the United States was not his nation—the
Nation of Islam was. Elijah Muhammad refused to register for the military
draft and was indicted on federal charges of sedition. Convicted of a lesser
charge, the religious leader was imprisoned from 1943 to 1946. It was a pat-
tern that the movement’s luminaries would repeat over the following decades,
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ELIJAH MUHAMMAD’S NOI
as the leader’s son, Wallace D. Muhammad, went to prison for refusing the
draft in the era of the Korean War and then, most famously, Cassius Marcellus
Clay—Muhammad Ali—refused to be inducted during the Vietnam War.10
By the 1950s, Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam had stood as a symbol
of (non-violent) resistance to US militarism for more than a decade. But what
started as a relatively small movement, one of many different groups that were
cultivating religious, political and cultural identities grounded in alternative
notions of black ethnicity, emerged in the postwar period as the most promi-
nent and successful Muslim religious organisation among African Americans.
It was becoming what historian Penny Von Eschen calls ‘a space—for the most
part unthinkable in the Cold War era—for an anti-American critique of the
Cold War’.11
As a result, the FBI adopted more aggressive counter-intelligence tech-
niques to try to repress the movement. FBI informants were either placed
inside of, or recruited from, the ranks of the Nation of Islam. In 1956, J. Edgar
ous findings. Eventually, the FBI even turned to writing anonymous letters to
Elijah Muhammad’s wife about his extra-marital affairs. The point of the
activities, according to a declassified FBI memorandum, was to expose the
movement as a fraud and to create dissension in the ranks.12
But it was not only the FBI that was worried about the Nation of Islam, as
Thurgood Marshall’s comment in 1959 revealed. In advocating the establish-
ment of racially separate social and cultural institutions and businesses along
with a religion that preached black superiority, the Nation of Islam offered an
alternative to the postwar liberal vision of a racially integrated country sus-
tained by a strong welfare state. Liberals, both black and white, were deeply
disappointed in the weak, watered-down civil rights bill that majority leader
and future President Lyndon B. Johnson managed to pass through the
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
up as a threat to social stability. The fact that African American liberals such
as Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins and Derrick Bell, all of whom were
NAACP officials at the time, so ferociously attacked the Nation of Islam indi-
cates the depth of its challenge. This critique of the group was also adopted by
the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who named the Nation of Islam as the
‘largest’ and ‘best known’ black nationalist movement in the United States in
his now-canonical 1963 ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’. King tried to make
the threat plain to his white audience by arguing that domestic black national-
ism would spill over into violence in the same way that political revolutions
were sweeping through the developing world. He said the need for change was
urgent. The Nation of Islam was thus appropriated, at times in apocalyptic
language, as a symbol of what was to come—‘the fire next time’—unless racial
equality was achieved.14
The passage of civil rights laws in 1964 and 1965 did not, however, quiet
the radical voice of opposition to postwar liberalism. In fact, both white and
black youth began to amplify the call for greater social and political changes.
For most African Americans, the passage of these laws did little to eliminate
the presence of de facto racial discrimination—and even in the case of de jure
discrimination, it would take years before Jim Crow segregation was disman-
tled through federal law enforcement and the courts. Various advocates of
Black Power and eventually Black Consciousness began to adopt and adapt
the rhetoric and programmes of the Nation of Islam, advocating black pride,
community self-defence, separate schools, racially separate businesses, and
perhaps most commonly, an opposition to the Vietnam War. Even as various
aspects of the movement were rejected as insufficiently radical, Nation of
Islam member Muhammad Ali’s willingness to give up the heavyweight box-
ing crown and then to go to jail rather be inducted into the US Army became
a symbol of dissent unmatched in the United States and around the world.15
As a result, the FBI still regarded the NOI as a major threat. In 1967, it
increased what it described as its ‘operational intensity’ in counter-intelligence
operations—called COINTELPRO—against the NOI. Targeting ‘Black
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ELIJAH MUHAMMAD’S NOI
the Nation of Islam, having dealt with government repression since the 1930s,
was able to withstand the interference. Even after the departure of Malcolm X
in 1964, the movement established new mosques, increased the circulation of
its weekly newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and expanded its sales of fish and
bean pies.
During this era, the Nation of Islam was also a threat to the modern,
reformist vision of Islam that many Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims were attempting
to promulgate in the United States after the Second World War. The dozens
of Sunni and Shi‘a Muslim American congregations that appeared across the
country—from Ross, North Dakota, and Detroit, to New York City and Los
Angeles—were eclipsed in the media and often the popular imagination by
the Nation of Islam. This was partly a result of the disinformation campaign
of the FBI, whose leaks to major media led to national press coverage. In 1959,
after CBS News ran a Mike Wallace exposé on the movement called ‘The Hate
that Hate Produced’, what had been a growing consciousness of the movement
among African American communities was transformed. With Malcolm X’s
rise as a media figure in New York, his separation from the Nation of Islam in
1964, and his assassination, the Nation of Islam remained a ‘good story’. It
would become an even bigger story when US Olympian Cassius Clay won the
heavyweight boxing crown and changed his name to Muhammad Ali—and
then became perhaps the most prominent face of global protest against US
involvement in the Vietnam War. While Muslim groups not associated with
the Nation of Islam succeeded at building political ties and social influence at
the local level in places such as New York City, Detroit and Toledo—and
among the diplomatic corps in Washington, DC—there was little doubt that
in the 1960s most Americans who had heard of Muslims equated them with
the ‘Black Muslims’, that is, the Nation of Islam.
There was fascination with and simultaneous repulsion felt by many Sunni
and Shi‘a Muslim leaders in the United States and abroad with the Nation of
Islam’s unorthodox teachings, which included a belief in the divinity of
Nation of Islam founder W.D. Fard and the prophecy of the Messenger from
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world’ in the mid-1950s.17 For others, the NOI represented a popular Muslim
movement whose ‘heretical’ theology must be challenged gently and at times
set aside for the sake of Muslim American political unity. In 1972, for exam-
ple, Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, the director of the Islamic Center in
Washington, DC, appeared at an NOI rally against police violence in New
York, praising the accomplishments of Elijah Muhammad and stressing the
unity of all Muslims abroad with Muslims in the United States.18
But for many local leaders of Muslim congregations, especially African
American leaders of Ahmadi and Sunni congregations, the success of Nation
of Islam as perhaps the best organised, the best funded and the most popular
Muslim organisation in the United States was frustrating, even maddening at
times. The same was true for American-born and foreign-born missionaries
who were associated with the South Asian-based Tablighi Jama‘at, the
Egyptian-based Muslim Brothers, and the (Saudi-funded) Muslim World
League. The Nation of Islam accounted for almost half of all operating
Muslim congregations in the United States, and its budget, though secret, was
likely in the millions of dollars by the 1960s. Upon Elijah Muhammad’s death
in 1975, he was estimated to be worth tens of millions. Its weekly newspaper,
Muhammad Speaks, had a circulation in tens of thousands, if not the hundreds
of thousands—making it one of the most read black newspapers in the coun-
try. By the 1960s, the Nation of Islam’s competitors launched a variety of
attacks against the legitimacy of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.
The intellectual machinery of the Nation of Islam responded with a vigorous
defence of the Messenger’s Islamic authenticity while also seeking through
aggressive street recruiting to maintain a rate of congregational growth that
most Muslim American organisations could only envy.19
The strong institutional presence of the Nation of Islam translated into a
threat for the hegemony of modern, reformist and ultimately liberal visions of
Islam. Its very structure, a Muslim organisation based not so much on authorita-
tive readings of the Qur’an and the Sunnah as on the prophetic authority of a
man from Georgia who lacked formal education, Arabic literacy and traditional
Islamic credentials, was revolutionary. It created a new source of mystical, char-
ismatic Islamic authority during a time in which Islamic reform and renewal
groups such as the Muslim Brothers and the Jamaat-e Islami were challenging
the legitimacy of such authority. Moreover, the Nation of Islam’s interpretation
of Islam as a religion of black liberation contradicted the liberal notion, then in
its ascendency, that Islam was a religion that eliminated racial prejudice. It is no
wonder that liberals and even some leftists, Muslim or not, reacted in an apo-
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ELIJAH MUHAMMAD’S NOI
plectic manner to the group’s teaching. Figures ranging from the nineteenth-
century Liberian nationalist Edward Wilmot Blyden and Indian Ahmadi
missionary Muhammad Sadiq to historian Arnold Toynbee and Islamic Center
of Geneva Director Said Ramadan were agreed: Islam was the most anti-racist
religion in the world.20 The Nation of Islam concurred, but went further, articu-
lating an Islamic theology of black chosen-ness that rejected the desirability of
integration. Finally, the Nation of Islam’s anti-American critique was a position
that, at the time, was undesirable to many doggedly anti-communist reformers.
Instead, the Nation of Islam allied itself and its Islamic teachings with third
world revolutionaries and the non-aligned movement.21
Even as the Nation of Islam challenged a postwar liberal world order linked to
US military power, Euro-American proxy wars in the third world, white
supremacy and Christian identity, it also advocated and enforced deeply con-
servative elements of American culture among its membership. In the 1950s
and early 1960s, Elijah Muhammad’s Victorian and heteronormative approach
to human sexuality and gender relations did not distinguish his movement
from many other religious groups, whether conservative or liberal. For exam-
ple, until the late 1960s and the 1970s, the mainstream liberal position in
American religious organisations on matters of women’s reproduction rights
was not very different from the conservative one. At the very least, the gap
between liberal and conservative religionists widened as conservatives identi-
fied the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which effectively defined abortion as an
individual right of women (during a certain period of time during pregnancy),
as a key issue for the practice of Christianity and other religious traditions in
the United States.22
Throughout this period, young and old leaders of the Nation of Islam
remained committed to conservative notions of gender and sexuality. The
official gender and sexual ethics of the Nation of Islam were derived from the
prophetic pronouncements of Elijah Muhammad, but they were informed by
a much older politics of respectability. Ascendant in Elijah Muhammad’s
youth, the link between respectability and Victorian constructions of the
black body responded to the physical and emotional harm that black people
in the United States faced during so-called nadir in race relations from 1880
to 1920. Its main idea was to protect the black body from lynching and job
discrimination by making it ‘respectable’. Also called civilisationism, this
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interpretation of Islam that allowed for only personal self-defence. Their claim
to CO status was reasonable, though it was ultimately denied in Ali’s case. Ali
eventually won his case on appeal, but the 1971 decision was made by the US
Supreme Court on technical grounds, avoiding the larger issue of whether Ali
was entitled to CO status.28
The use of the US state and federal courts to protect the individual rights
of Nation of Islam members was not an isolated one. In fact, from the perspec-
tive of US legal history, the far more consequential use of the courts in this
manner was in the area of prisoners’ rights. Muslim prisoners wished to gather
for religious meetings, read religious literature, receive visits from Muslim
ministers (which is what they were called in the Nation of Islam), eat pork-free
food and celebrate religious holidays such as Ramadan (which was celebrated
in the Nation of Islam during Yuletide rather than during the Islamic month
of Ramadan). Unlike Clay v. United States, some of the rulings issued with
regard to these issues became precedent-setting, thus influencing the history
of US jurisprudence with regard to all prisoners. Among the precedent-setting
cases involving members of the Nation of Islam was Fulwood v. Clemmer, a
case decided by the US District Court for the District of Columbia in 1962,
which ruled that prisoners had the right to wear religious medals and attend
religious services. That same year, the New York State Court of Appeals said
in Brown v. McGinnis that members of the Nation of Islam had the right to
sue for their religious liberty in state courts. Finally, and most importantly, in
1964 the US Supreme Court ruled in Cooper v. Pate that members of the
Nation of Islam had ‘standing’ or the right to sue prison officials in federal
courts for religious discrimination. The ruling came as a blow not only to
prison officials who hoped to effectively ban the Nation of Islam but also to
law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, which had been arguing since
the 1950s that the Nation of Islam was not a legitimate religion, but a political
movement. This was also the argument of the State of Illinois, which lost the
case. This precedent thus limited, for the time being, the use of the courts in
the attempts of both federal and state officials to retard the growth of the
Nation of Islam—from now on, the movement would have to be considered
a legal religious organisation in any dispute that became a subject of litigation
in the US courts.29
While such victories by the Nation of Islam increased their standing in the
eyes of the law and also among liberals outside the movement, the group’s
reliance on the discourse of individual rights seemed to be a capitulation to
the very nation from which they were seeking a separate identity. Relying on
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ELIJAH MUHAMMAD’S NOI
the US legal system lent legitimacy to the state, and perhaps most importantly,
led Nation of Islam members to rehearse the social contract of liberalism at
the heart of US nationalism. By the 1970s, some Nation of Islam members
under the new leadership of W.D. Mohammed would become flag-waving US
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In 1974, the year before his death, he also launched a fish import business,
Whiting H and G (headed and gutted). All of these businesses benefited from
the internal markets and built-in sales forces for their goods. The fish could be
sold by the same young men who hawked the newspaper. Movement members
and the general public were encouraged to purchase their groceries and baked
goods from Muslim-owned stores that were supplied by Elijah Muhammad’s
farms, dairy, and meat processing plant.
The focus on foodstuffs in this vertically integrated, multi-million dollar
empire reflected Elijah Muhammad’s ethical teachings about the black body.
The prophetic pronouncements that commanded members to practise values
of sexual discipline, healthy eating, good hygiene and respectable dress were
joined by demands that one become economically productive, whether at
home or in the marketplace. So, in addition to studying the lessons of the
Prophet, attending temple meetings and fishing for new members, Nation of
Islam families sought to exhibit their commitment to Islam through market-
oriented activity. In Elijah Muhammad’s view, this productivity and capital
accumulation was supposed to lead to some degree of self-determination in a
white-dominated marketplace. Elijah Muhammad did not critique the tech-
niques and rules of capitalism; he sought to get his own piece of the pie. In so
doing, Elijah Muhammad replicated the capitalist ideologies of past leaders
such as Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, who framed black libera-
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than wait for their reward in Heaven. Heaven and hell, he preached, were
states of mind on earth, not separate worlds to which one goes after death.32
By the late 1960s, these teachings came under fire from many younger activ-
ists in the Black Power movement for its lack of revolutionary ideology and
action. While groups such as the Black Panthers Party clearly built on the
notions of black identity that the Nation of Islam had popularised, many of
its members expressed the same frustration with the organisation that
Malcolm X had felt during the early 1960s. Critiques of the Nation of Islam
did not focus on its radical symbolic protest of white supremacy, US national-
ism, US foreign policy or Christianity—in fact, those critiques would be
adopted and adapted by an increasing number of African Americans—but
rather on the non-violent, insular and politically quietistic nature of the move-
ment. In addition, Islam itself became an object of scorn by various cultural
nationalists or Black Consciousness advocates who cast Islam and Arabs as
foreign to the African continent and African people. This was a period of
African American history characterised by greater interest in African lan-
guages such as Swahili, devotion to African deities such as the Orisha, and in
various forms of clothing and food inspired by what were seen as authentic
African traditions, sometimes in distinction from Muslim cultural practices.
In 1971, Black Panther Party Prime Minister Stokely Carmichael argued, for
example, that Islam was barbaric, and that Arab armies had brought it and the
slave trade to Africa. That same year, writer Chancellor Williams issued a
similar indictment of Islam and Arabs, identifying them as conspirators in his
Destruction of Black Civilization.33
These critiques of the movement help to identify the shifting political
ground on which it stood, fairly immoveable, for decades. The movement’s
teachings, once regarded by large numbers of both black and white Americans
as a radical assault on the ideological foundations of American culture during
the era of the liberal consensus in the 1950s and 1960s, seemed politically
quietistic or insufficiently ‘black’ by the 1970s. The movement also began to
look different to some of the same liberals who in the early 1960s saw it a
threat to the promise of civil rights. When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975,
for example, a New York Times editorial praised the leader for his ability to
reform the lives of those whom federal programmes had been unable to help
and for his contributions to the black pride movement.34 By the 1970s, when
Alex Haley’s Roots became a national bestseller, it seems that even the stark
black separatism of the Nation of Islam could be viewed as yet another form
of ethnic revival and heritage.35
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ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
The movement would split into two major groups after its Messenger’s
death. The more popular branch, led by Elijah Muhammad’s son,
W.D. Muhammad, changed the name of the group to the World Community
of al-Islam in the West, and later to the American Muslim Mission and the
American Society of Muslims. Muhammad considered himself to be a mujad-
did, or renewer of the faith, and oversaw a Sunni reformation of the once
prophetic movement. He replaced the charismatic authority and revelations
of his father with the scriptural authority of the Qur’an, and to a lesser degree,
the Sunnah. The new organisation allied itself with Sunni religious authorities
across the Muslim world and especially with those associated with the Muslim
World League. W.D. Muhammad retained his independence from foreign-
born American Muslim leaders and foreign missionaries, but helped to broad-
cast a liberal version of Islam that was thoroughly in support of US patriotism,
global capitalism, and eventually, US involvement in the First Gulf War.36
Minister Louis Farrakhan formed the other major branch of the post-Elijah
Muhammad Nation of Islam in reaction to these Sunni reforms. Farrakhan
announced by 1978 that he would resurrect Elijah Muhammad’s teachings.
Farrakhan retained all components of the Nation of Islam outlined above, but
also incorporated more and more Sunni teachings into his pronouncements.
Eventually, some Nation of Islam congregations would perform salat, the five
daily prayers of Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims, and benches would be taken out of
some mosques. Farrakhan became arguably more radical than Elijah
Muhammad in his association with non-aligned, often explicitly anti-US leaders
such as Mu‘ammar Qaddafi.37 Like a notable number of leaders in sub-Saharan
Africa, Farrakhan supported Qaddafi until the bitter end. He did not relinquish
his focus on black separatism in the United States nor did he soften his critique
of anti-black racism; his philosophy of economics was decidedly capitalist.
Conclusion
The changing ways in which the Nation of Islam was viewed, and by whom,
offer helpful indices by which the evolving meaning of liberalism in the United
States during the twentieth century can be evaluated. The Nation of Islam was
regarded as so counter-cultural that it exposed the nature of what historian
Arthur Schlesinger Jr in 1949 dubbed the ‘vital center’, that is, the liberal
Western alternative to communism and socialism. Regarded as seditious by the
FBI during the Second World War and prosecuted as such, the Nation of Islam
became merely subversive, but even more dangerous to law enforcement agen-
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ELIJAH MUHAMMAD’S NOI
cies by the 1950s and 1960s. Though law-abiding and largely non-violent, the
Nation of Islam encouraged a moral and political geography among black
Americans that denied the legitimacy of claims by both the nation-state and the
Christian Church to the loyalty of African Americans. In the United States,
black liberals were as likely as white liberals to condemn the racial separatism of
the movement, which was seen as a threat to and negation of the dream of a
racially integrated society. Foreign Muslim students and many domestic
Muslims outside the Nation of Islam criticised the movement as religiously
illegitimate. But beyond the borders of the United States, third world revolu-
tionary leaders, including Muslims in Africa and Asia, came to see the Nation of
Islam, especially in the persons of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, as potential
allies in their attempts to throw off a colonised consciousness and oppose US
foreign policy in their countries and regions.
While this aspect of Nation of Islam politics remained a radical component
of the movement under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad and later Louis
Farrakhan, other elements of the movement came to be seen as increasingly
conservative by black liberals and radicals in the 1970s. The emphasis on
Victorian gender relations was sometimes framed as reactionary, while the
endorsement of Islam over African traditional religion was at times seen as a
form of black self-hatred. For black socialists, it goes without saying that the
Nation of Islam’s enthusiastic endorsement of capital accumulation and petit-
bourgeois behaviours was anathema. Strangely enough, by the 1970s many
American liberals had found something in the movement to respect. The fact
that its one-time critics had become at least partial admirers shows how much
US politics, both liberal and conservative, had begun to change. In the after-
math of Vietnam and the Watergate scandals, the Nation of Islam’s essential
distrust of the US government was widely shared by US citizens. More and
more mainstream citizens saw their government as hypocritical and became
cynical about its prosecution of dissenters. The Nation of Islam may not have
been liked much more, but it no longer seemed so dangerous.
The radical critique of white supremacy and the dream of Afro-Asian soli-
darity once represented by Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam were kept
alive by Minister Farrakhan, but as in the United States, the shifting political
landscape of the Muslim-majority world changed the nature of its impact.
Whereas Gamal Abdel Nasser once offered leadership in a non-aligned move-
ment that was seen as an existential threat to the Cold War interests of the
United States, the open-door, pro-US stance of his successor, Anwar Sadat,
meant that the United States no longer had to fear Egyptian leadership of an
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14
POST-ISLAMISM AS NEOLIBERALISATION
Peter Mandaville
Introduction
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cal victories, but rather the story of how Islamic activism has transformed over
the past couple of decades in response to market forces generated by the global
neoliberalism whose geopolitical face Islamism opposed for so long.
In their conventional usage within Western social science, the terms ‘political
Islam’ and ‘Islamism’ have been used more or less interchangeably to refer to
actors and groups whose ideological orientation, organisational modes and
ultimate agenda revolve around the establishment of a political order based on
Islam—usually through the capture of state power and the direct implementa-
tion of shari‘a law by that state—with the Muslim Brotherhood movement
generally serving as the chief exemplar of this approach. Analyses of Islamism
and the ‘Islamic revival’ have pointed out that this kind of activism is primarily
a middle-class phenomenon, reflecting the embrace of ‘authentic’ nativist or
local alternatives by educated, newly urbanised segments of Muslim society
whose social mobility has been blocked by the authoritarianism of corrupted
national-secular or monarchical regimes allied to the West. In other words,
and invoking the language of classical social movement theory, political Islam
stems from the relative deprivation experienced by new middle classes whose
rising expectations of economic success and political participation do not
materialise.10 Since the late 1990s, however, a number of scholars have begun
to question some of the conceptual categories and causal logic that underpin
this account of Islamism. In his essay ‘What Is Political Islam?’ anthropologist
Charles Hirschkind points out that the very term political Islam seems to
imply a preoccupation with the separation of religion and politics that reflects
Western secular norms and marks as dangerous (or, at the very least, analyti-
cally noteworthy) the encroachment of religion into spaces of politics, while
the massive colonisation of religious institutions and social spaces by the
modern state in the Muslim world does not seem to have created a similar
preoccupation with ‘religious statism’.11
Two further dimensions of Hirschkind’s critique are particularly relevant
for our purposes and have been echoed in the work of other scholars studying
the sociology of Muslim politics. The first of these, which has already been
alluded to above, relates to the over-reliance in much of the literature on struc-
turalist accounts of Islamism. Hirschkind decries what he sees as a ‘reduction
of [Islamic] movements to an expression of the socio-economic conditions
which gave rise to them’.12 Similarly, others have rejected the reduction of
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Islamic activism to the class interests of the relevant actors or the propensity
to see Muslim collective action ‘primarily as a compensatory reaction to struc-
tural changes rather than a potential force for change in itself ’.13 Hirschkind’s
essay also makes the point that not all forms of Islamic activism have as their
goal the capture of state power, but that we should nevertheless understand
what they do to be deeply political in nature.14 Enquiring into the nature of
Islamism and its contemporary social location, Bayat similarly invites us to
consider various forms of Islamic activism that do not correspond to the clas-
sic model of political Islam. Among these he includes the recent conservative
upsurge in the Egyptian courts, media, and universities, the expansion of local
Islamic reading circles, and a number of public religious figures—among them
Selim al-Awwa and Mustafa Mahmoud—whose identities do not fit easily
into the categories of religious scholar (‘alim) or Islamist,15 but who can still
be thought of as exponents of the ‘Islamic movement’. Moreover, he suggests
that we may be seeing in countries such as Egypt a downturn in support for
Islamic activism oriented towards formal political power precisely because
Islamisation at the societal level seems to have been so successful.16 In other
words, if there is no need for top-down Islamisation by the state due to the
prevalence of effective Islamising forces within society, then the Muslim
Brotherhood as a formal political project has put itself out of business. Going
on to chastise social movement theory for conceptualising political impact
exclusively in terms of official power, Bayat suggests that ‘social movements
may also succeed in terms of changing civil societies, behavior, attitudes, cul-
tural symbols and value systems which, in the long run, may confront political
power’.17 This slippage at the end, however, leaves us wondering whether even
Bayat, while championing the transformative capacity of social movements
whose immediate object is not state power, might still see much of their effec-
tiveness as linked to an eventual impact on formal politics. So how can we
conceptualise and think about social movements such that their political
significance exists in something other than an interest in capturing—or, at
some point in the future, having an impact on—state power?
Scholars of ‘new social movements’ have emphasised that these projects are
different in type from the traditional model of social movement found in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century, which tended to focus on material
conditions, class interests and achieving changes in the prevailing political or
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POST-ISLAMISM AS NEOLIBERALISATION
ised movements separate from the realms of everyday life (home, work, educa-
tion, shopping), the pursuit of Islamic normativity becomes ingrained within
the pragmatic spaces of quotidian activity. Islam is not rendered as an external
ideology, but instead is lived.
While our discussion of post-Islamism as involving the privatisation of
religion in contexts of heterogeneous social power and proliferating Muslim
public spheres is helpful in understanding some of the key dynamics behind
the emergence of new forms of religious authority and social movements in
the Muslim world, a piece of the conceptual puzzle still seems to be missing.
If, as Roy and others have argued, Muslim politics today is about the individu-
alisation of religious belief and practice, in what sense can we appropriately
speak of these actors as constituting a movement? How can we discern in this
trend any meaningful sense of collective action, the standard indicator of a
social movement? Are we dealing with anything more than new intellectuals
and popular preachers speaking to atomised believers who interpret and act
on their ideas and teachings in the context of their individual daily lives? As
Bayat poses the question, ‘what makes them a movement defined as co-oper-
ative unit [sic], in terms of the collective activities of many people to bring
about social change? After all unity of purpose and action is the hallmark,
indeed a defining feature, of a social movement.’28
Bayat addresses this question by arguing that we must disabuse ourselves of
the idea that new social movements can always be thought of as being defined
by a precise set of concrete aspirations and goals, universally accepted within
the movement. What he suggests instead—particularly with regard to the
‘non-Western’ (that is, politically illiberal) world, where opportunities for
unfettered social mobilisation and strategic communication by opposition
movements and civil society actors are limited—is that movements come to
be built around a loosely shared normative core and a movement ‘frame’29 that
thematises, but does not concretely specify, the purposes of collective action.
Just as the anti-globalisation movement today contains within it many diverse
and at times competing conceptions of justice, so do contemporary Islamist
and Islamic movements contend with multiple visions of what the social reali-
sation of Islam might look like. Likewise, and recalling Melucci’s idiom of
movements for social change as constituted through everyday life rather than
through dedicated social organisations and mobilisation, it becomes possible
to see the contours of new Islamic movements in the ‘imagined solidarities’30
created through mediated communication. In other words, Muslims work in
their individual capacities for social change while simultaneously embodying
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the ethics of a shared conception of the good life. Their communion exists not
through common membership in tight, hierarchical social movement organi-
sations but rather through shared patterns of consumption (listening, reading,
shopping) and forms of everyday life. Contrast this with, for example, the
relatively rigid array of hierarchical ‘family’ (usra) units that constitutes the
classic organisational model of the Muslim Brotherhood, itself drawing heav-
ily on Leninist precepts. These are above all everyday life forms associated with
neoliberal forms of subjectivity.
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satellite channel Iqra TV. From this followed two further programmes,
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Brotherhood in its early days. This likely helps to explain why, at the height of
his popularity, the Egyptian government banned Khaled from speaking pub-
licly in Egypt—a move that prompted him to relocate his entire operation to
the United Kingdom. After the 25 January 2011 revolution, Khaled returned
to Egypt and founded a political party, Hizb Misr (Egypt party). He has gen-
erally kept a low profile and sought—with some success—to avoid being
caught up in the intense polarisation that has characterised Egyptian politics
in recent years.
Aside from whatever political plans he may have, we also need to remember
that Amr Khaled is also—perhaps even first and foremost—a marketing phe-
nomenon and a ‘brand name’. Approaching him this way also helps us to work
our way back towards thinking about what he might represent in terms of a
social movement of the everyday. Unlike a rigid and hierarchical social move-
ment organisation, the power of a brand name lies precisely in its ability to
build community through practices that bridge individual and collective
consumption. There are of course limitations to this kind of movement, not
least of which is to be found in their rather diffuse nature, making it difficult
for the movement as a whole to be mobilised towards a particular goal.42 Also,
consumers are fickle and brand names consequently volatile. In order to be
transformed into something approaching a sustainable mass social movement,
the brand name must manage not only to become a constitutive element of
social identity, but also to develop a concrete manifestation in social real-
ity—hence Khaled’s shift with Lifemakers towards an implementation of his
teaching at the level of society. We have already noted, however, that his target
demographic has certain boundaries. While Khaled markets certain versions
of his products to those consuming at a lower price point—such as audio
cassettes, glossy books and leaflets summarising his lessons—the substance of
his social activism lies in his ability to get people out into society to foment
change, and the capacity to do this is limited to those who have time and
resources on hand.
It is clear from the discussion above that Muslim groups today are developing
a new ‘repertoire of collective action’, to use political sociologist Charles Tilly’s
terms.43 Movements constituted by the loose (and often diffuse) coordination
of aggregated individual everyday practices seem to be gaining momentum as
an alternative to classic Islamism. Conventional social movement organisa-
295
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
296
POST-ISLAMISM AS NEOLIBERALISATION
Pushing one aspect of the argument even further, we can also speculate
about how the primacy of consumption practices within certain segments of
Muslim societies is having an impact on how people think about what it
means to engage with social and political issues from an Islamic perspective.
This is where Melucci’s conception of social movements of the everyday
becomes relevant, particularly those aspects of his work that focus on concep-
tions of social change premised on the lived embodiment of movement norms
within daily individual conduct. Bringing in the ubiquity of neoliberal norms
and media saturation among Muslims in the West and middle-class settings in
the Muslim-majority world, this approach transposes the location of Islamic
activism from revolutionary movements to spaces and practices of consump-
tion. As Amel Boubekeur puts it:
The traditional intra-Islamic modes of action and mobilization, such as aggressive
street demonstrations and political militancy, make less sense. The new Islamic
elites reinterpret their relations … in terms of networks and partnerships. Notions
of partnership will develop according to standards of competence and competitive-
ness … Where the traditional Islamic [activism] was heavy, expensive, and very
framed, the Islamic identity suggested by this new culture sets of mobilizations,
identifications, modes of actions, and participation that is less expensive, less stig-
matizing. The classical notions of Islamism, such as the sacrifice for the cause and
the suffering, weak, and dominated disappear. What is proposed is the revaloriza-
tion of the personal pleasure of consumption, success, and competitiveness.44
Given this characterisation, it is not surprising that some of the more tradi-
tional Islamist actors have dismissed this new consumer-oriented trend as
superficial and disengaged from the hard questions of ‘real’ politics. At the
same time, however, the Islamists—like the state—are in two minds about
these new movements. They are a growing force, and since they are premised
on Islam they threaten the Islamists’ turf and threaten to poach away their
constituents. The Islamists and the state are both concerned about the amor-
phous and diffuse nature of these new actors. The state because they locate
themselves in spaces and practices less easily regulated through traditional
instruments of power. Moreover, the state finds itself in something of a
dilemma since these new movements are to be found in specific domains (such
as private enterprise and small-to-medium business growth) that the state is
actually trying to encourage in the name of national development. Some
Islamists also worry about the inability of the state to check the rapid growth
of neoliberal Islamisation. Locked for decades in a tense struggle with the state
that often saw their advances blocked, these Islamists worry about the impact
on their fortunes of a rapidly proliferating rival that appears largely immune
297
ISLAM AFTER LIBERALISM
298
pp. [2–3]
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. See Joseph Massad’s recent book, Islam in Liberalism, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015.
2. For the invention of religion as a universal category, see Tomoko Masuzawa, The
Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the
Language of Pluralism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
3. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, ‘The Historical Development in Islam of the Concept
of Islam as an Historical Development’, in On Understanding Islam: Selected Studies,
The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1981, pp. 41–77. See also Shahab Ahmad, What
Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2015.
4. Muhammad Iqbal, ‘Reply to Questions Raised by Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru’, in
Syed Abdul Vahid (ed.), Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad
Ashraf, 1992, p. 271. The chapters by Faisal Devji and Abdennour Bidar in this vol-
ume engage with the thought and influence of Iqbal.
5. For reappraisals of the nineteenth-century Arab ‘renaissance’, see the chapters by
Hussein Omar and Nadia Bou Ali in this volume.
6. See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century
British Liberal Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. For the con-
tested nature of liberalism, including within this period, see Duncan Bell, ‘What is
Liberalism?’, Political Theory, 42, 6 (2014), pp. 682–715.
7. See Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological
Origins of the United Nations, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
8. For a discussion of the making of non-Western liberalism as an autonomous and
creative rather than merely derivative phenomenon, see C.A. Bayly, Recovering
299
pp. [3–11] NOTES
9. Ayman al-Zawahiri, ‘Selected Questions and Answers from Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri:
(http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/
political-theology-and-islamic-studies-symposium-islamism-as-anti-politics/).
16. For an example of such an anti-liberal stance, see Faisal Devji’s chapter on
Muhammad Iqbal in this volume.
17. For the recent emergence of new political narratives in the Gulf, see Ahmed
Dailami’s chapter in this volume.
18. For the persistence of race in contemporary constructions of Islam, see the chap-
ters on US Islam by Michael Muhammad Knight and Edward E. Curtis IV in this
volume.
19. Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies, Chicago:
Chicago University Press 1988; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal
Age 1798–1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983.
20. This has included engagement by prominent Western political philosophers such
as Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas on wider issues relating to religion and
the public sphere. See Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Antwerpen (eds), The
Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
21. For a Rawlsian approach, see Andrew March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The
Search for an Overlapping Consensus, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
22. For contemporary intellectual developments in Indonesia in this regard, see Carool
Kersten’s chapter in this volume.
23. Evident, for example, in Abdennour Bidar’s exposition of Muhammad Iqbal in
this volume.
24. Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics and Modernity’s Moral Predicament,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. On Hallaq, see also Neguin Yavari’s
chapter in this volume.
300
NOTES pp. [11–19]
25. See, for example, the work of Mohammed Bamyeh and Michael Muhammad
Knight. See also Zaheer Kazmi, ‘Automatic Islam: Divine Anarchy and the
Machines of God’, Modern Intellectual History, 12, 1 (2015), pp. 33–64.
26. See Zaheer Kazmi, ‘The United Kingdom’s Extreme Anti-extremism Policy’,
ForeignAffairs.com, 5 August 2015 (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/
united-kingdom/2015–08–05/
united-kingdoms-extreme-anti-extremism-policy).
27. See Sadia Abbas’s chapter on art and protest in this volume. On Muslim social
movements and the limits of the ‘political’ as a category of analysis, see also Peter
Mandaville’s chapter.
28. For a paradigmatic example of this method, see Mustafa Akyol, Islam Without
Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.
29. For the ideological uses of the Islamic concept of al-wasatiyya in the context of
current debates on Islamic moderation, see Zaheer Kazmi’s chapter in this
volume.
30. See, for example, Edward Curtis’s chapter on the Nation of Islam’s strategic use of
liberalism in this volume.
31. These areas of academic enquiry are contested and not yet well established but
there has been a growing interest and intellectual output in recent years regarding
questions of comparison in political thought and the neglect of non-Western
approaches to the study of history and politics wherein the role and nature of lib-
eralism has also loomed large. See, among others, Michael Freeden and Andrew
Vincent (eds), Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices, Abingdon:
Routledge 2013, and Bayly, Recovering Liberties.
6. Ibid.
301
pp. [19–23] NOTES
7. The one exception is Zachary Lockman, ‘Exploring the Field: Lost Voices and
Emerging Practices, 1882–1914’, in Israel Gershoni et al. (eds), Histories of the
Modern Middle East: New Directions, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002,
pp. 137–54.
8. See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993, pp. 144–69.
9. Eric Davis, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization,
1920–1941, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
10. This approach is best encapsulated in the seminal article by Walid Kazziha, ‘The
Ummah–Jarīdah Group and Egyptian Politics’, Middle Eastern Studies, 13, 3
(1997), p. 376.
11. Kazziha, ‘Jarīdah–Ummah Group’, is a paradigmatic example.
12. Reinhard Schulze, ‘Mass Culture and Islamic Cultural Production in 19th Century
Middle East’, in Georg Strauth and Sami Zubaida (eds), Mass Culture, Popular
Culture and Social Life in the Middle East, Boulder: Westview Press, 1987,
pp. 189–222.
13. Abdeslam Maghraoui in Liberalism Without Democracy: Nationhood and
Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
14. Noting the mass proliferation of the term ‘liberal’ both within and outside of the
academy, Duncan Bell rejects an essentialised and transhistorical understanding
of liberalism. Bell argued that the invention of liberalism as a deep (and exclu-
sively) European essence was the legacy of the Cold War. See Duncan Bell, ‘What
Is Liberalism?’, Political Theory, 42, 6 (2014), pp. 1–34.
15. Ibid., p. 6.
16. Ibid., p. 10.
17. Ibid., p. 6.
18. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 11.
19. Michael Gasper, The Politics of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 223.
20. It is no coincide that the only Egyptian party of the early years, the Egyptian Liberal
Party, was developed to stymie the growing nationalism and to defend the neces-
sity of the British Empire.
21. See FO 78/4763, which describes a ‘very moderate newspaper, which generally
supports the cause of the British occupation’.
22. PRO 30/29/I60, ‘Malet to Granville’, 18 September 1882.
302
NOTES pp. [23–25]
27. Aaron Jakes, ‘State of the Field: Agrarian Transformation, Colonial Rule and the
Politics of Material Wealth in Egypt, 1882–1914’, PhD diss., New York University,
2014, p. 5.
28. Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, Safahhat Matwiyya min Tarikh al-Haraka al-Istiqlaliya fi
Masr: Min Māris sanat 1907 ilá Māris sanat 1909; ʿAṣr al-inqilab al-fikri fi al-
siyasa al-wataniya, Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Muqtaṭaf wa-al-Muqaṭṭam, 1946,
pp. 121–35.
29. Ibid., pp. 14–15.
30. John Romich Alexander, The Truth About Egypt (London: Cassell and Company
Ltd, 1911), p. 95. The Egyptian Liberal Party was known as Hizb al-Ahrar in
Arabic but usually went, on accounts of its Anglophilia, by its English name.
31. Ibid.
32. FO 371/249 no. 3058, 12 September 1907.
33. Ibid.
34. Mustafa Kamil, What the National Party Wants, Cairo: The Egyptian Standard,
1908, pp. 8–9.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 10.
37. Ibid.
38. FO 371/ no. 33861, 12 October 1907.
39. Kamil charged ʿUrabi with incitement to civil strife (fitna). See Yuwaqim Rizq
Murqus (ed.), Awraq Mustafa Kamil: Al-Maqalat, Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Misriyya
al-ʿAmma li-l-Kitab, 1992, p. 273
40. An English translation of the speech delivered on 22 October 1907 at the Zizinia
Theatre in Alexandria was published as Mustafa Kamil, What the National Party
Wants (Cairo: The Egyptian Standard, 1908), p. 31.
41. Al-Garida, 3 April 1907.
‘Abd al-’Aziz Jawish, al-‘Alam al-Islami, Istanbul: Dar al-Khilafa al-Islamiyya, 1912,
p. 10.
43. Kamil, ‘Speech’, p. 32.
44. Ibid., pp. 31–2.
45. Hourani, Arabic Thought, pp. 208–9.
46. This referred to the Chinese boycott of 1905–6, which was a response to American
exclusionary and discriminatory practices toward Chinese immigrants. See Sin-
Kiong Wong, ‘Die for the Boycott and Nation: Martyrdom and the 1905 Anti-
American Movement in China’, Modern Asian Studies, 35, 3 ( July 2001),
pp. 565–88. Similarly, the Swadeshi (self-sufficiency) movement was launched in
303
pp. [26–31] NOTES
the same year in 1905 and was aimed at making India economically self-sufficient.
This involved the boycott of British goods as the first step toward home-rule.
47. Aaron Jakes, State of the Field, p. 554; Jawish, al-‘Alam al-Islami, pp. 10–15.
48. Kazziha, ‘Ummah–Jarīdah Group’, pp. 374–78. Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul at first
joined the party, but later renounced it.
49. ʿAbd al-Khaliq Lashin, Saʿd Zaghlul Dawruhu fi al-Siyasa al-Misriyya hatta Sanat
1914, Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1971, pp. 87–9.
50. See Yaseen Noorani, Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2010, p. 129, for this mistaken view.
51. See al-Garida, 26 April 1908. On Amin’s refusal to join the party, see ‘Abd al-
‘Azim Ramadan (ed.), Mudhakkirat Sa’d Zaghlul, Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Amma al-
Misriyya li-l Kitab, 1982, vol. 1, p. 334.
52. Hourani, Arabic Thought, p. 147.
53. Indira Falk Gesink, Islamic Reform and Conservatism: Al-Azhar and the Evolution
of Modern Sunni Islam, London: IB Tauris, 2009, pp. 163–96.
54. Qasim Amin, Les Égyptiens: Réponse à M. le Duc d’Harcourt, Cairo: J. Barbier,
1894.
55. Ibid.
56. Muhammad Talaat Harb, Tarbiyat al-Marʾa wa-l-Hijab, Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Ṭaraqī,
1899, p. 3.
57. Ibid., p. 5.
58. Yuwaqim Rizq Murqus (ed.), Awraq Mustafa Kamil: Al-Maqalat, Cairo: al-Hayʾa
al-Misriyya al-ʿAmma li-l-Kitab, 1992, p. 155.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. See in particular the influential essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’ in Frantz Fanon, A Dying
Colonialism, New York: Grove Press, 1965, pp. 35–67.
62. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender, pp. 44–69.
63. Ahmed explains her motivations for re-examining Amin’s book by pointing to the
post-1979 years, for she argues that Hourani’s account has failed to explain the
Islamic Revival. See Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from
the Middle East to America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 19–46,
305–8.
64. Ahmed, Women and Gender, pp. 144–69.
65. Faisal Devji, ‘Apologetic Modernity’, Modern Intellectual History, 4, 1 (2007),
p. 62.
66. Ahmed, Women and Gender, pp. 148–9.
67. Ibid., pp. 144–69.
68. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 6.
304
NOTES pp. [31–37]
69. On the suppression of slavery, see Gabriel Baer, ‘Slavery in Nineteenth Century
Egypt’, Journal of African Studies, 8, 3 (1967), pp. 417–41.
70. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 11.
71. Kamil, What the National Party Wants, 32.
72. Ibid.
73. See Anwar Jindi, ʿAbd al-’Aziz Jawish min Ruwwad al-Tarbiya wa-al-Sahafah
wa-l-Ijtimaʾ, Cairo: al-Muʾasasa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿAmma; al-Dar al-Qawmiya li-l-
Ṭibaʿa wa-al-Nashr, 1965, and Salim Qunaybar, al-Itijahat al-Siyasiyya wa-l-
Fikriyyah wa-l-Ijtimaʿiyya fi al-Adab al-ʿArabi al-Muʿasir: ʿAbd al-’Aziz Jawish,
1872–1929, Benghazi: Dār Maktabat al-Andalus, 1968.
74. ʿAbd al-’Aziz Jawish, Al-Islam: Din al-Fitra wa-l-Hurriyya, Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl,
n.d., p. 10.
75. Jawish, Al-Islam, p. 10.
76. Ibid., p. 11.
77. Ibid., p. 10.
78. Ibid., pp. 95–7.
79. Ibid., pp. 97–8.
80. Ibid., pp. 61–2.
81. Ibid., p. 60.
82. Ibid., p. 59.
83. Ibid.
84. ‘A Stranger in the Land’, al-Liwaʾ, 17 June 1908.
86. Ibid.
87. ‘Self-Denial’, al-Garida, 12 January 1909.
92. Ibid.
93. ‘Independence and Us’, al-Garida, 11 April 1908.
1908.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.
99. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture,
edited by Patrick Riley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
100. ‘English in Egypt’.
101. Ibid.
305
pp. [37–45] NOTES
102. ‘Self-Rule’, al-Garida, 15 September 1907.
103. Ibid. See Aaron Jakes, ‘State of the Field: Agrarian Transformation, Colonial
Rule, and the Politics of Material Wealth in Egypt, 1882–1914’, PhD diss., New
York University, 2014.
104. ‘English in Egypt’.
105. Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1895, London:
Routledge, 2004, p. 9.
106. ‘Self-Denial’, al-Garida, 12 January 1909.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid.
112. Al-Garida, 25 April 1908.
113. Arabian poet, died c. 712 CE. Best known for his unrestrained love poetry, of
306
NOTES pp. [45–52]
2. CORRUPTING POLITICS
1. Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Khutbba fī ʾadāb al-‘arab, Beirut: American University of Beirut,
Archives and Special Collections Department, 1859.
2. Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, Culturalism in the Age of Capital,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 27.
3. Ibid., p. 47.
4. Ibid., p. 51.
5. Interpellation in its Althusserian understanding is the process through which sub-
jects are constituted by ideology. Althusser’s oft-quoted example to illustrate this
is of the hailing of an individual by a police officer, whereby the subject recognizes
himself or herself in the other’s hail. Mladen Dolar has argued, however, that the
Althusserian schema falls short of accounting for the process of misrecognition
underpinning interpellation. Dolar proposes, contra the Althusserian reading,
that the subject can only emerge from the failures of structure or from misrecog-
nition. Dolar’s critique of Althusser allows for an analysis of the moments of break-
down of liberal ideology and culturalism rather than historicizing them as a
self-enclosed totality. Refer to Dolar’s ‘Beyond Interpellation,’ Qui Parle, Vol. 6,
No. 2 (Spring/Summer 1993), pp. 75–96.
6. al-Bustānī Butrrus, al-Tuhhfa l-Bustānıyy ya fıl-asfār al-kurūziyya (Bustānī’s master-
piece of Crusoe’s travels). Beirut: American Missionary Press, 1860. American
University of Beirut, Archives and Special Collections Department.
7. Eric Santner, On the Psycotheology of Everyday Life, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001, p. 5.
8. Andrew Sartori, ‘The Resonance of “Culture”: Framing a Problem in Global
Concept-History’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct.
2005), p. 681.
9. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Tolerance as an Ideological Category’, Critical Inquiry (Autumn
2007).
10. Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Kitāb al-sāq ʿala al-sāq fī ma huwa al-fāryāq: aw ayyām
wa-shuhūr wa-aʿwām fī ʿajm al-ʿarab wa-al-aʿjām, Beirut: Dār al-ḥayāt, n.d., p. 82.
11. A form of metaphor that alludes implicitly to the attribute of the described (usu-
ally praised) subject without naming it explicitly.
12. Shidyāq, Al-Sāq, p. 82.
13. Shidyāq, ‘Al-Dhawq’ (On taste), Mukhtārat, p. 167.
307
pp. [52–55] NOTES
14. Shidyāq, ‘Al-Musīqā’ (On music), Mukhtārat, p. 182.
14. Ibid.
15. Al-Shidyāq, Kitāb al-sāq ʿala al-sāq fī ma huwa al-fāryāq, p. 2.
16. In Why Are the Arabs Not Free? The Politics of Writing (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2007), Moustapha Safouan highlights the impoverished nature of the translation
of politics as siyasa whereby the original meaning of politics from polis is replaced
by sasa, which means to lead as a horse leads a cart.
17. Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif, vols. 1–11, Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d. The
dictionary was compiled between 1867 and 1882; ironically, it remained incom-
plete at the last entry, ‘Ottoman’.
18. Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif, vol. 4, p. 466.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid
22. Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, ‘Fi uṣūl al-siyāsa’ (On the principles of politics), Mukhtārat
Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, pp. 148–67.
23. Ibid., p. 150.
24. Ibid., p. 148.
25. Ibid., p. 151.
26. Ibid.
27. Eric Santner’s reading of the Hobbesian Leviathan or social contract as a pros-
thetic device, a mutation that grows between nature and culture and for which
the preservation of life is intertwined with the possibility of its being taken away
by the sovereign who guards it. Santner argues that there is an excess underlying
sovereignty, which he defines as a ‘bit of flesh,’ an element exceeding the immun-
isation that sovereignty is meant to offer society. This ‘bit of flesh’ is always there
once the signifier of master is contracted by subjects, like a virus, and in which is
discerned ‘the bareness, nakedness, and vulnerability pertaining to the precarious-
ness of our organic, mortal lives; the bareness, nakedness, and vulnerability per-
taining to the fact that the historical forms of life in which we dwell are susceptible
to breakdown.’ Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the
Endgames of Sovereignty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. 18.
28. Al-Shidyāq, ‘Fi uṣūl al-siyāsa’, p. 151.
29. Lacan’s four discourses or structures of social bonds (the master’s discourse, the hys-
teric’s discourse, the university discourse, and the discourse of the analysis) consider
the social and political as realms organised around a peculiar set of symbolic iden-
tifications. In the master’s discourse, which best describes pre-capitalist relations,
there exists a relation of fetishistic domination between lord and serf, premised on
conceiving of the master as being in the position of ‘absolute knowledge’ or as a
‘subject supposed to know.’ The master’s discourse is an episteme in which the know-
how or savoir-faire of the worker is literally abducted from them by the lord.
308
NOTES pp. [55–64]
30. In Lacan’s ‘university discourse’, as opposed to the ‘master’s discourse’, science and
knowledge take the master’s position in the social bond (see note 30).
31. Santner, Royal Remains, p. 12.
32. Ibid.
33. Al-Shidyāq, ‘Fi uṣūl al-siyāsa’, p. 157.
34. Aḥmad Fāris Al-Shidyāq, ‘al-Insān ashraf al-makhlūqāt’ (On the supposed digni-
fied state of humankind over all other creatures), in Yūsuf Qazma Khūrī (ed.),
Mukhtārat Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Beirut: Al-Muʾasasa al-sharqiyya lil-nashr
wa-al-ṭibāʿa, 2001, p. 227.
35. Ibid.
36. Refer to Eric Santner’s My Own Private Germany, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret
History of Modernity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
37. Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII, Cambridge:
Polity, 2016.
38. Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Al-Hayʾa al-ijtimāʿiya, w-al-muqābala bayn al-ʿawāʾid al-ʿarabiya
w-al-ifranjiya (On social organisation and the comparison between Arab and
European cultures), American University of Beirut Archive and Special Collections,
1849.
39. Nadia Bou Ali, ‘Buṭrus al-Bustānī and the Shipwreck of the Nation’, Middle Eastern
Literatures, vol. 16, no. 3 (2013), pp. 266–81.
40. This is a story that Bustani translates into Arabic during the wars of 1860. He refers
to the plight of Crusoe who is shipwrecked and isolated when discussing post-war
society in the Nafīr Sūriyya (The clarion of Syria) Pamphlets (1860–1) as well as
in his speech on society in 1849.
41. Al-Bustānī, Al-Hayʾa al-ijtimāʿiya, p. 17.
42. Al-Bustānī, Nafīr Sūriyya, Pamphlet 10, 22 February 1861.
309
pp. [65–86] NOTES
3. ILLIBERAL ISLAM
1. Muhammad Iqbal, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, edited with notes by Syed
Abdul Vahid, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1992, p. 321.
2. Ibid., p. 211.
3. Ibid., pp. 163–4.
4. For this, see especially the sections on capitalism and communism in Iqbal’s Persian
work of 1932, the Javid Nama, in Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Javid-Nama, trans. Arthur
Arberry, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1966, pp. 66–71.
5. Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, New Delhi:
Kitab Bhavan, 1990, p. 179.
6. Muhammad Iqbal, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, pp. 373–4.
7. Ibid., p. 168.
8. Ibid., p. 162.
9. Ibid., pp. 248–9.
10. Ibid., pp. 196–7.
11. Ibid., pp. 167–8.
12. Ibid., p. 204.
13. Ibid., p. 173.
14. Ibid., p. 193.
15. Ibid., pp. 212–13.
16. Ibid., p. 190.
17. Ibid., pp. 261–2.
18. Ibid., p. 194.
19. Ibid., p. 197.
20. Ibid., p. 102.
21. Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, ch. 4.
22. For an elaboration of this idea along somewhat different lines, see Emmanuel
Levinas, ‘Language and Proximity’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans,
Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993.
23. Iqbal, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, p. 227.
24. Muhammad Iqbal, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia: A Contribution to
the Study of Muslim Philosophy, Lahore: Bazm-e Iqbal, 1959, p. 125.
25. Ibid., pp. ix–x.
26. Ibid., p. xi.
27. Iqbal, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, p. 3.
28. Iqbal, Development of Metaphysics in Persia, p. 83.
29. Iqbal, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, pp. 4–5.
30. Ibid., p. 35.
31. Ibid., pp. 239–40.
32. Ibid., p. 90.
310
NOTES pp. [86–92]
311
pp. [92–93] NOTES
Aufklärung?’, Die Welt des Islams, 36, 3 (1996), pp. 317–25 and for an opposing
view, Rudolf Peters, ‘Reinhard Schulze’s Quest for an Islamic Enlightenment’, Die
Welt des Islams, 30, 1 (1990), pp. 160–2; also, a thoughtful commentary by
Mehmet Yilmaz Akbulut, ‘The Debate on the “Islamic Enlightenment” of the
Eighteenth Century’ (https://www.academia.edu/8612787/The_Debate_on_
the_Islamic_ Enlightenment_of_the_eighteenth_Century).
7. Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform: the Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad
Abduh and Rashid Rida, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966, as quoted
in Abdulkader Tayob, Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009, p. 24.
8. See Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols., Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1974; and Bruce Lawrence and David Gilmartin, ‘Introduction’,
in David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (eds), Beyond Turk and Hindu:
retrospect-hodgson-venture-islam/).
10. Chris Bayly, ‘Marshall G.S. Hodgson, Islam and World History’, Humanitas
2013 (http://oxforddigital.tv/streaming/humanitas-chris-bayly.html).
11. The emerging field of environmental history may furnish a fresh and culture-free
approach. Trendsetters in this regard include Rhoads Murphey, ‘The Decline of
North Africa since the Roman Occupation: Climatic or Human?’, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 41 (1951), pp. 116–32. In an article on the
ramifications of environmental change for debunking pseudo-explanations for
European ascendancy in social, cultural, religious, or political terms, Richard
W. Bulliet has argued that cheap animal labour available in the arid zones of the
Middle East and North Africa where grazing is abundant and free, in contrast with
the relatively high costs of harnessing animal power in cold and forested Europe,
where animals must be fed and sheltered, explains the rise of technologies—the
water mill in this instance—that led to capital accumulation in Europe around
the twelfth century (well before the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution).
This hypothesis, Bulliet writes, is ‘crucial to moving the debate over the post-1400
economic disjunction between Europe and the lands of Islam from the realm of
culture, religion, and politics to the realm of the economics of natural resource
management’. Richard W. Bulliet, ‘History and Animal Energy in the Arid Zone’,
in Alan Mikhail (ed.), Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East
and North Africa, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 51–70; reference
is at p. 66.
312
NOTES pp. [93–95]
12. Metahistories on the rise of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in the Anglo-
American academy published after 9/11 must be separated from those authored
previously. Examples of these critiques, which see in the study of Islam in the
Anglo-American academy a genealogy for Islamophobia and military aggression
against Muslim majority nations in the post-9/11 world, are provided in the
bibliography.
13. James Bill, ‘The Study of Middle East Politics 1946–1996: A Stocktaking’, The
Middle East Journal, 50, 4 (1996), pp. 501–12.
14. Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Sciences’, in
David L. Szanton (ed.), The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines,
Berkeley: University of California Press and University of California Area Studies
Digital Collection, 2002, pp. 28–60; reference is at p. 8 (HYPERLINK “http://
escholarship.org/uc/item/59n2d2n1” \l “page-50” http://escholarship.org/uc/
item/59n2d2n1#page-50).
15. See among others, R. Stephen Humphreys, Tradition and Innovation in the Study
of Islamic History Islamic Area Studies Working Paper Series 1, Tokyo, Islamic
Area Studies Project, 1998.
16. Mitchell, ‘Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Sciences’, p. 9.
17. Ibid., p. 8.
18. Richard Bulliet, ‘Pages from a Memoir: The Middle East Studies Association’, 1980
(https://www. academia.edu/8302705/pages_from_a_memoir-the_middle_
east_studies_association).
19. María Jesús González Hernández, Raymond Carr: The Curiosity of the Fox, trans.
Nigel Griffin, Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Publications, 2013, pp. 212–35.
20. Ibid., pp. 341–51; and William Roger Louis, ‘Review of Raymond Carr, The
Curiosity of the Fox by María Jesús González Hernández’, English Historical Review,
129 (October 2014), pp. 1250–2; reference is at p. 1251.
21. The Nadav Safron debacle at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern
Studies is among the best known, although several other professors, including
Samuel Huntington, whose clash of civilisations thesis met an eager audience in
the post 9/11 world, had suffered his own CIA-scandal in 1986 (see Michelle
M. Hu and Radhika Jain, ‘Controversy Erupts Over Professors’ Ties to the CIA,
22. Tawfiq Sayyigh (d. 1971) was a celebrated Christian Arab poet and literary critic,
see Issa J. Boullata, ‘The Beleaguered Unicorn: A Study of Tawfīq Sāyigh’, Journal
of Arabic Literature, 4 (1973), pp. 69–93; and Mitchell, ‘The Middle East in the
Past and Future of Social Sciences’, p. 10.
23. Mitchell, ‘The Middle East in the Past and the Future of Social Sciences’, p. 12.
24. Literature on the hypocritical stance of human rights advocates, who proclaim a
liberal and progressive platform while—even if unwittingly—supporting and pro-
313
pp. [95–96] NOTES
moting Western interests in the third world is gathering steam. See Samuel Moyn,
‘Human Rights in Heaven’, in Adam Etinson (ed.), Human Rights: Moral or
Political?, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014; and, Stephen Kinzer, ‘Are
Today’s Human Rights Activists Warmongers?’, Boston Globe, 25 May 2014
(http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/24/are-human-rights-activ-
ists-today-warmongers/gef04rpPxgEdCEdx4DQ87J/story.html). Against gay
rights platforms, see Joseph Massad’s Desiring Arabs, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007, and contra feminism, see Deepa Kumar, ‘Imperialist Feminism
and Liberalism’, Open Democracy, 6 November 2014 (https://www.opendemoc-
racy.net/deepa-kumar/imperialist-feminism-and-liberalism).
25. Ian Black, ‘Wikileaks Reveals Degree of Durham University’s Involvement in Iran’,
The Guardian, 10 February 2011 (http://www.theguardian.com/commentis-
uk/?p=10679).
26. Ian Black, ‘Iranian Tensions Shake Durham’s Ivory Towers’, The Guardian,
10 February 2010 (http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/feb/10/iranian-fund-
314
NOTES p. [97]
35. Bryan S. Turner, ‘Re-reading Said: Late Thoughts’, Middle East Institute, 20 April
2012 (http://www.mideasti.org/content/re-reading-said-late-thoughts).
36. Mitchell, ‘Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Sciences’, p. 16.
37. Robert J.C. Young, ‘Edward Said: Opponent of Postcolonial Theory’, in Tobias
Döring and Mark Stein (eds), Edward Said’s Translocations: Essays in Secular
Criticism, New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 23–43.
38. Samer Frangie, ‘On the Broken Conversation between Postcolonialism and
Intellectuals in the Periphery’, Studies in Social and Political Thought, 19 (2011),
pp. 41–54, Arif Dirlik emphatically ties the rise of postcolonial theory to ‘when
Third World intellectuals arrived in the First World academe’, see his ‘The
Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical
Inquiry, 20, 2 (1994), pp. 328–56, reference is at p. 329; ‘Roger Owen, “Edward
Said and the Two Critiques of Orientalism”’, Middle East Institute, 20 April 2012
(http://www.mideasti.org/content/edward-said-and-two-critiques-orientalism);
Lawrence Rosen, ‘Orientalism Revisited: Edward Said’s Unfinished Critique’,
Boston Review, 1 January 2007 (http://www.bostonreview.net/rosen-orientalism-
revisited); and Daniel Martin Varisco, ‘Orientalism’s Wake: The Ongoing Politics
of a Polemic’, Middle East Institute, 16 August 2012 (http://www.mideasti.org/
(https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/).
41. Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in
Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007,
pp. 191–3.
42. For a fuller articulation of that critical platform, see Richard Bulliet, ‘Orientalism
and Medieval Islamic Studies’, in John Van Engen (ed.), The Past and Future of
Medieval Studies, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994, pp. 94–104;
and the debate between Richard Bulliet and Hichem Djaït in Diogenes, 95 (1976),
pp. 93–104.
43. Jalal Al Ahmad, Plagued by the West, Gharbzadagī, trans. Paul Sprachman, Delmar,
NY: Caravan Books, 1982; and Dar khidmat va khiyānat-i rawshanfikrān, Tehran:
Ravaq, 1980.
44. Hichem Djait, La personnalité et le devenir arabo-islamiques, Paris, Éditions du
Seuil, 1974.
315
pp. [97–99] NOTES
45. Abdallah ‘Arawi (Abdullah Laroui), The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism
or Historicism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
46. Samir Amin, The Arab Nation: Nationalism and Class Struggles, London: Zed
Press, 1978; on Samir Amin, see also, Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Stage of Modernity’,
in Timothy Mitchell (ed.), Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 1–34.
47. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 2008.
48. Hybridity as a hallmark of a globalising world order is often assumed to destabi-
lise binaries and ‘Western’ notions of race and belonging; see Judith Butler and
Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics,
Belonging, London: Seagull Books, 2007.
49. Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, ‘After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism,
and Politics in the Third World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 1
(1992), pp. 141–67; reference is at p. 142.
50. Peter Gran, ‘Subaltern Studies, Racism, and Class Struggle: Examples from India
and the United States’, unpublished paper form Working Paper series, Department
of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University, Pullman, WA,
1999, as quoted in David Ludden, Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History,
Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia, London: Anthem Press,
2003, p. 4.
51. One example among many is Maya Jasanoff ’s facile resolution of Edward Said’s
dilemma, when asked in an interview if he had written Orientalism as an oriental
or an occidental. ‘I really don’t know’, Said had responded. Dismissing Said’s
response as hasty, ‘the real answer’, Jasanoff claims, ‘is that he wrote it as both’. See
Maya Jasanoff, ‘The Book that Shook Us: Orientalism at 30’, The Guardian, 13 June
2008 (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jun/13/middleeast.
israelandthepalestinians).
52. The Impossible State: Islam, Politics and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012, has received multiple reviews; see Andrew
F. March, ‘What Can the Islamic Past Teach Us about Secular Modernity?’, Political
of The Impossible State’, Middle East Journal, 67, 3 (2013), pp. 492–3; Muhammad
Hashas, ‘Qirā‘at fī kitāb al-dawla al-mustaḥīla’, 23 January 2014, Mominoun with-
out Borders Foundation for Studies and Research, Religion and Politics Division
(www.mominoun.com/arabic/ar-sa/articles/9381); and Hussain Iza, Nathan
J. Brown and Neguin Yavari, “Review Symposium: The Impossible State’, Perspectives
316
NOTES pp. [99–101]
55. Ibid., p. 2.
56. Ibid., p. 11.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., pp. 16–18.
59. Hallaq’s discussion of the modern paradigmatic state is a namedropping spree. He
enlists a motley troop of theorists: from Carl Schmitt to Thomas Kuhn, John Gray,
Michel Foucault, Leo Strauss, Charles Larmore and Charles Taylor. Plato, Aristotle,
Aquinas, Descartes, Francis Bacon, Voltaire, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume, Spinoza,
Hegel, Kant, Vico, Marx, Nietzsche, Bentham, Mill, Kierkegaard, Rawls, Gramsci
and many more; all making cameo appearances. He cites these theorists not to
draw them into a conversation. Rather, bits and pieces from each theorist are strewn
together to make possible his claim that re-enchantment is in order in the West,
or that Ghazzali anticipates Foucault. See Hallaq, Impossible State, p. 129.
60. Reinhard Schulze, A Modern History of the Islamic World, trans. Azizeh Azodi,
New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp. 222–6.
61. Neguin Yavari, ‘Tafsīr and the Mythology of Islamic Fundamentalism’, in Andreas
Görke and Johanna Pink (eds), Tafsīr and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring
the Boundaries of a Genre, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, Chapter 9
62. Schulze, Modern History of the Islamic World, p. 247.
63. Ibid., pp. 248–9.
64. See on this Zaheer Kazmi’s review of Tariq Ramadan’s The Arab Awakening; “The
Limits of Muslim Liberalism,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 4 April 2014 (https://
lareviewofbooks.org/essay/limits-muslim-liberalism/).
65. Ahmad Ghorab, Subverting Islam: The Role of Orientalist Centers, London:
Minerva, 1995, is a salacious if lightly sourced account of this relationship. On
sectarian politics in several Persian Gulf states, see Toby Matthiesen, Sectarian
Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring that Wasn’t, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2013.
66. Muhammad Fikri, ‘Harim-i khususi-i shahrvandan dar andisha-i Imam Khomeini’,
Ittila‘at, 4 February 2012, issue no. 25240, pp. 6–7.
67. Vali Nasr, Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam with Shape the Future, New
York: Norton, 2006, p. 134, as quoted in Wikipedia, ‘Ruhollah Khomeini’, mod-
ified 5 October 2014 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhollah_Khomeini). See
also in this regard, Timothy Mitchell; ‘Economists and the Economy in the
Twentieth Century’, in George Steinmetz (ed.), The Politics of Method in the Human
Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, Durham: Duke University Press,
2005, pp. 126–41; John Markoff and Verónica Montecinos, ‘The Ubiquitous Rise
of Economists’, Journal of Public Policy, 13 (1993), pp. 37–68; Marion Fourcade,
‘The Construction of a Global Profession: The Transnationalization of Economics’,
American Journal of Sociology, 112 (2006), pp. 145–94.
68. Peter Gordon, ‘What Is Intellectual History? A Frankly Partisan Introduction to
317
pp. [102–107] NOTES
a Frequently Misunderstood Field’ (2007, revised 2009) (http://history.fas.har-
vard.edu/people/faculty/documents/pgordon-whatisintellhist.pdf ).
69. Amr Hamzawy, ‘Arab Writings on Islamist Parties and Movements’, International
Journal of Middle East Studies, 43, 1 (2011), pp. 138–40.
70. Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015, p. 54.
71. In 2016, for example, 342 (32.39%) of the 1056 papers presented at the annual
conference of the Middle East Studies Association of North America Boston
focused on the 19th-21st centuries; 188 papers had ‘modern’ in the title; 228 papers
were in Political Science/International Affairs, and 419 papers in History. Issues
in Middle East Studies, 39, 1 (2017), p. 17 (https://mesana.org/mymesa/display_
publications.php?f=1373-d645920e395fedad7bbbed0eca3fe2e0).
72. Richard Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994, p. 3.
73. Ibid., p. 12.
74. For a thorough discussion on the Arab Spring, see ‘Reflections Symposium’,
Perspectives on Politics, 12, 2 (2014), pp. 394–419.
75. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004, p. 170.
76. Muhtashimipur, among Khomeini’s staunchest allies and the architect of Iran’s
Syria policy in the early days of the revolution, left Iran in protest following the
election crisis of 2009. Power cuts in Najaf have forced him to spend the summers
in Tehran. Sayyid ‘Ali Akbar Muhtashimipur, ‘Payam-i Imam bi Hafiz Assad’,
Asiman, n.s. 31 (1991), pp. 16–20; and Muhtashimipur, ‘Bashshar Assad bi in
rahati-ha raftani nist’, Khabar Online, 22 July 2012 (1 Mordad 1391); http://
khabaronline.ir/detail/229669/Politics/diplomacy
77. Muhtashimipur, ‘Payam-i Imam bi Hafiz Assad’, p. 20.
78. Many influential scholars have espoused a revival of Mu‘tazili teachings (those of
the ‘Muslim rationalists’ that flourished in the ninth century) to counter contem-
porary extremism; see Josef Van Ess, The Flowering of Muslim Theology, trans. Jane
Marie Todd, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006; and my review of
Van Ess in The American Historical Review, 112, 2 (2007), pp. 623–4.
318
NOTES pp. [108–114]
published L’islam face â la mort de Dieu (Bourin Editeur, Paris, 2010) and L’islam
spirituel de Mohammed Iqbal (Albin Michel, Paris, 2007)
2. Gianni Vattimo, La fin de la modernité, nihilisme et herméneutique dans la culture
post-moderne (The end of modernity, Nihilism and hermeneutics in the postmod-
ern culture), trans. Charles Alunni, Paris: Seuil, 1987 [1985], pp. 35–6.
3. Ibid., p. 36.
4. Ibid., p. 35.
5. Muhammad Iqbal, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, East Lansing, MI:
H-Bahai, 2001 [1908]. English translation by Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, Paris:
Sindbad, 1st edn 1980, p. 115.
6. Muhammad Iqbal, Reconstruire la pensée religieuse de l’islam (Six lectures on the
reconstruction of religious thought in Islam), London, 1934; Muhammad Iqbal,
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, trans. Eva Meyerovitch, London:
Dodo Press, 2009/Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1955, p. 63.
7. This is reminiscent of Norbert Elias’s criticism of the place of the homo clausus of
Descartes, and the larger and broader thinking of the homo socius that opposes it
(Norbert Elias, La société des individus: The Society of Individuals, Paris: Fayard,
1991 [1987]).
8. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, in Oeuvres complètes/The Creative Evolution,
Paris: PUF, 1984 [1959], p. 725.
9. Iqbal, Reconstruire la pensée religieuse de l’islam, p. 123.
10. See Note 1 of this chapter.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Iqbal Singh, The Ardent Pilgrim, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1951],
p. 52.
14. Ibid., pp. 52–3.
15. Ibid., p. 53.
16. Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phénomène humain, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963.
17. Iqbal, Development of Metaphysics in Persia, p. 87.
18. Ernst Mayr, Qu’est-ce que la biologie? (This is biology), Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1998
[1997], p. 211.
19. Ibid., p. 35.
20. André Pichot, Histoire de la notion de vie (History of the idea of life), Paris:
Gallimard, 1993, p. 826.
21. For an introduction to this question, see Georges Pétavy, Qu’est-ce que le dessein
intelligent? Comment en refuter les theses, Paris: Vuibert, 2010.
22. Bergson, L’evolution créatrice, in Œuvres complètes, p. 720.
23. Ibid.
24. Emphasis added.
25. Bergson, L’evolution créatrice, p. 721.
319
pp. [115–120] NOTES
26. Albert Camus, L’homme révolté, Paris: Gallimard, 1951, p. 213.
27. See especially Apollodore, La bibliothèque, trans. from the Greek under the direc-
tion of Paul Schubert, Neuchâtel: L’Aire, 2003.
28. This is what I have called ‘a Muslim existentialism’ (L’islam sans soumission: Pour
un existentialisme musulman, Paris: Albin Michel, 2008).
29. Jacques Maritain, Humanisme intégral, Paris: Aubier, 1936.
30. Cornelius Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société, Paris: Seuil, p. 39.
31. Marshall Sahlins, La nature humaine: Une illusion occidentale (Human nature, a
Western illusion), Paris, Editions de l’Eclat, 2009 [2008]
32. Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société, pp. 36–7.
33. Ibid., p. 220.
34. From my open letter to the Islamic world, published in French newspaper
Marianne: http://blog.oratoiredulouvre.fr/2014/10/tres-profonde-lettre-ouverte-
au-monde-musulman-du-philosophe-musulman-abdennour-bidar/
35. Particularly in French-speaking Canada. See, for example, Antoine Robitaille, Le
nouvel home nouveau: Voyage dans les utopies de la posthumanité, Montréal: Les
Editions du Boréal, 2007.
36. Singh, Ardent Pilgrim, p. 62.
37. Iqbal is very close, on this point, to Hinduism, which presents the self-realisation
as an experience of ‘Sat-Chit-Ananda’: Supreme Being, Supreme Self-Awareness,
Supreme Beatitude.
38. Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, pp. 87–8
39. G.W.F. Hegel, Esthétique, book 1, French translation by Charles Bénard, edited
and completed by Beoît Timmermans and Paolo Zaccaria, Paris: Le Livre de Poche,
1997, p. 85: ‘In the second place, man becomes to himself by his practical activ-
ity, because he has the impulsion to produce and equally to recognise himself
through that which he is given immediately, that is to say that which, for him, is
existing on the exterior. He achieves this end by transforming exterior things, on
which he prints the seal of his interior, and in which he thus recovers his own deter-
minations. Man acts thus, as a free subject, in order to remove for the exterior
world his restive foreignness and to enjoy, only through the shape of things, of an
exterior realisation of himself.’ According to Iqbal’s philosophy, we might add that
the human recreation of the world will either be that of an ordinary ego, which
already manifests this capacity only to his expectations, and according to the shape
of the mediocrity of his aspirations and triviality of his needs, or be that of an ego
already en route to the superior aspirations of the Supreme Ego; such an ego will
want at the same time to recreate himself, and not only the exterior world, and
these creations aim more at the Good, the Just, the Beautiful, as all these ‘con-
sumer goods’ which we add nowadays to the world and which correspond very
often to the appeasing of material and futile desires.
40. Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, Paris: Gallimard, 2005.
320
NOTES pp. [120–127]
samaj.revues.org/3130).
1. M. Khalid Masud and Armando Salvatore, ‘Tradition and Modernity within Islamic
Civilisation and the West’, in Muhammad Khalid Masud, Armando Salvatore and
Martin van Bruinessen (eds), Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp. 43–5.
2. Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study, London: Routledge, 1974.
3. Armando Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity, Reading, UK:
Ithaca Press, 1997.
4. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978.
321
pp. [127–134] NOTES
5. Bryan S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism, London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1978.
6. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, Tübingen:
J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1986 [1920].
7. Salvatore, Islam.
8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas
Burger, Cambridge: Polity, 1989 [1962].
9. Armando Salvatore, The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, and Islam,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
10. While an exhaustive survey of this cleavage cannot be provided here, it is worth
mentioning five edited collections as being broadly representative of the debate
and its insufficiencies, from the viewpoint of the sociology of Islam: Ariel Mack
(ed.), Islam: The Public and Private Spheres, Social Research 70, 3, New York:
Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School University,
2003; Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman (eds), Public Islam and the
Common Good, Leiden: Brill, 2006; Armando Salvatore and Mark LeVine (eds),
Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies: Reconstructing the Public Sphere
in Muslim Majority Societies, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Nilüfer Göle
and Ludwig Ammann (eds), Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran, and Europe, Istanbul:
Bilgi University Press, 2006; Seteney Shami (ed.), Publics, Politics and Participation:
Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa, New York: Social
Science Research Council, 2009.
11. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World
12. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1939; 1968].
13. Turner, Weber and Islam; Georg Stauth and Bryan S. Turner, Nietzsche’s Dance:
Resentment, Reciprocity and Resistance in Social Life, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988; Roy
Jackson, Nietzsche and Islam, London: Routledge, 2007.
14. Georg Stauth, Islam und Westlicher Rationalismus: Der Beitrag des Orientalismus
zur Entstehung der Soziologie, Frankfurt: Campus, 1993.
15. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: How European Universalism
Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2005.
16. Ernest Renan, L’islam et la science; Avec la réponse d’al-Afghânî, Montpellier:
L’Archange Minotaure, 2005 [1883].
17. Michelanelo Guida, ‘Al-Afghānī and Namık Kemal’s Replies to Ernest Renan:
Two Anti-Westernist Works in the Formative Stage of Islamist Thought’, Turkish
Journal of Politics, 2, 2 (2011), pp. 57–70.
18. Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable
Future, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 156–94.
19. Ibid., p. 138.
322
NOTES pp. [134–144]
20. Nile Green, ‘Breathing in India c.1890’, Modern Asian Studies, 42, 2–3 (2008),
pp. 283–315.
21. Armando Salvatore, ‘Authority in Question: Secularity, Republicanism, and
“Communitarianism” in the Emerging Euro-Islamic Public Sphere’, Theory, Culture
and Society, 24, 2 (2007), pp. 135–60.
22. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion,
Bryan S. Turner and Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, p. 23.
323
pp. [146–152] NOTES
42. Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road, Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
43. Arnason, Civilizations; Armando Salvatore, ‘Eccentric Modernity? An Islamic
Perspective on the Civilizing Process and the Public Sphere’, European Journal of
Social Theory, 14, 1 (2011), pp. 55–69.
44. Johann P. Arnason, Civilisations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical
2014 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30273812).
2. ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find
things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the
faith he preached’, Pope Benedict XVI, ‘Lecture of the Holy Father: Faith, Reason
and the University Memories and Reflections’, University of Regensburg, Libreria
Editrice Vaticana,12 September 2006 (http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-
xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_uni-
versity-regensburg.html).
3. Rupert Shortt, Christianophobia: A Faith under Attack, London: Random House,
2012.
4. For a recent study of religious minorities in Egypt, see Saba Mahmood, Religious
Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015.
5. ‘Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true
followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalizations, for authentic
Islam and the proper reading of the Quran are opposed to every form of violence.’
Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, London: Random House, 2014, p. 166.
6. The idea of the dangers of a ‘tyranny of the majority’ associated with democracy
has a long pedigree in both ancient and modern Western political thought; for
example, in the writings of James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville and J.S. Mill.
7. Salafi–Wahhabism has affinities with the Hanbali school, although the nature of
its precise relation to it is contested.
8. Qur’an, 2:143.
9. http://www.ammanmessage.com/
10. Mohammad Hashim Kamali, The Middle Path of Moderation in Islam: The Qur’anic
324
NOTES pp. [153–156]
Principle of Wasatiyya, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. For Ramadan’s
explicit inclusion of Shi’ism within his definition of classical Islam, see, among
others, Tariq Ramadan, Radical Reform, Islamic Ethics and Liberation, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
11. Underlying Nasr’s commitment to Sunni–Shi’a understanding is his wider attach-
ment to the ‘traditionalist’ idea of universal religion and Perennial philosophy,
including the influence of Frithjof Schuon. See William Chittick (ed.), The
Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2007.
12. In Shi’i jurisprudence, for example, ijma or ‘consensus’ is considered a source of
law but not in the Sunni sense of a consensus among the people or religious schol-
ars making something legitimate or a proof (hujjah) of its validity in itself. For the
Shi’a, such a consensus does not necessarily lead to rectitude in an Islamic sense
as all legal rulings by scholars are open to rational debate.
13. The idea of Ash’arism being tied to the ‘middle path’ of Islam is a common histor-
ical trope in Ash’arite apologetics. Thus, for example, in his ‘The Middle Position
of Al Ash’ari’, Ibn Asakir (d.1175) writes, ‘Al-Ash‘ari took the middle road [between
the Mu‘tazila and the anthropomorphists].’ See also John B. Henderson, The
islam.channel4).
18. Abdal Hakim Murad, Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions, Cambridge: The
Quilliam Press, 2012.
19. ‘The scholar reforms only because others have deformed. Adherence to Sunni Islam
is acceptance of the canons of this reforming process…and of the consensual move-
325
pp. [156–160] NOTES
ment of the Umma in the Four Schools. Only in their practices can the instru-
ments of ijtihad be successfully found as simultaneously flexible and authentic.
(Not) In the febrile fringes outside the Four Schools.’ Murad, Commentary,
pp. 157–8.
20. While his dismissal of the ‘febrile fringes outside the four schools’ alone would
suggest this general criticism, his online ‘Contentions’ about ‘Shi’ism’ reinforce
it. See note 25 below.
21. ‘For many Rafidites, the ‘Day of Judgement’ refers to Zainab, while the ‘Two Seas’
means Ali and Fatima’, Murad, Commentary, p. 162.
22. Ibid., p. 151. Winter occasionally uses the term ghulat which is itself used within
Shi’i theology to denote and censure the excesses of those who ascribe divinity to
the Shi’i Imams or otherwise exaggerate about them.
23. ‘“He will be punished severely”: Free Syrian Army Vows to Hunt Down Rebel
Commander Abu Sakkar Filmed Eating Government Soldier’s “Heart” in
Gruesome Propaganda Video’, Independent, 15 May 2013 (http://www.indepen-
dent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/he-will-be-punished-severely-free-syr-
ian-army-vows-to-hunt-down-rebel-commander-abu-sakkar-filmed-8615112.
html).
24. For details of the initiative, see http://curriculumforcohesion.org/
25. Available at a website dedicated to his writings: http://masud.co.uk/ISLAM/
ahm/contentions.htm and http://masud.co.uk/contention/contentions-9/. Here,
Winter uses the term ‘Shi’ism’ without qualification or distinction, as a catch-all
term.
26. Hassan Hassan, ‘Hatred, Violence and the Sad Demise of Yusuf al Qaradawi’, The
National, 28 January 2014 (http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/
comment/hatred-violence-and-the-sad-demise-of-yusuf-al-qaradawi#full).
27. http://islamopediaonline.org/fatwa/al-qaradawis-statement-shiites
28. Among major classical or pre-modern Sunni scholars who have published works
in this genre or otherwise asserted Shi’ism explicitly as a heresy are Ibn Ḥazm
(d.1064), Ibn al-Jawzi (d.1201), Ibn Taymiyya (d.1328), Ibn Khaldun (1406),
Aḥmad Sirhindi (d.1624), Shah Abdul Aziz (d.1824) and Muḥammad Ibn Abd
al-Wahhab (d.1792). The list of ‘moderns’ is also voluminous and notably includes
the nineteenth-century founders of both Deobandi and Barelwi Sufism in India,
contending strands of which stem from the Hanafi madhab, and, into the twen-
tieth century, the Syrian pan-Islamist associate of Muhammad Abduh, Rashid
Rida (d.1935).
29. Shaykh ul Islam Dr Muhammad Tahir ul Qadri, Fatwa on Terrorism and Suicide
2014 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-29893809).
326
NOTES pp. [160–163]
32. In 1996, for example, the Fatwa Committee for Religious Affairs, an official body,
issued a legal opinion stating that Shi’i Muslims were deviant and asserted the sole
theological legitimacy of Sunni orthodoxy in Malaysia. See also ‘In Otherwise
Tolerant Malaysia, Shi’ites Are Banned’, Al Arabiyya News, 14 January 2011
(https://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/01/14/133463.html).
33. ‘“Controlling” Shiah Necessary for Malaysia’s Sake, Says New GMM Chief ’, Malay
Mail, 6 December 2015 (http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/
controlling-shiah-necessary-for-malaysias-sake-says-new-gmm-chief ).
34. See, for example, the audio CD collection, Imam Al Ghazali, The Alchemy of
Happiness, trans. and commentary by Hamza Yusuf (Alhambra Productions, 2006)
and several works by Al Ghazali edited and introduced by Tim Winter.
35. See Yahya Michot, ‘Ibn Taymiyya’s “New Mardin Fatwa”: Is Genetically Modified
(GMI) Islam Carcinogenic?’, The Muslim World, 101: 2 (2011), pp. 130–81.
36. These surface comparisons can obscure as much as enlighten in trying to make
Islamic categories fit Western ones. For example, while the Sunni scholar Tariq
Ramadan has been described as ‘Islam’s Martin Luther’ as a signifier of his role in
a so-called Islamic ‘Reformation’, analogies are often made between Shi’i religious
authority and the papacy, despite, in the case of the Twelver Shi’i marja’iyya, the
Shi’i system being historically more voluntaristic and pluralistic than the Catholic
one. This latitude for legitimate interpretative disagreement in Shi’ism is also tied
to the enduring centrality of the practice of ijtihad (independent reasoning by a
qualified scholar), which has generally made Shi’i hermeneutics historically more
dynamic in exegetical terms than Sunnism. Part of the problem in positing such
comparisons lies in how affinities between the aesthetics of Shi’ism and Catholicism
on, for example, practices of iconography and intercession (affinities which are
themselves not confined to Shi’ism but also shared with certain Sunni practices),
are de-contextualised and then projected on to wider issues of religious authority
where there can be substantive divergence.
37. One of the founding fathers of liberalism, John Locke, excluded Roman Catholics
along with atheists from his conception of toleration. For a critical overview of
the period, see John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–
1689, New York: Routledge, 2013.
38. While European studies of early Islam by historical ‘Orientalists’ dominated by
this outlook are numerous, the influential work of the late Edinburgh University
academic, William Montgomery Watt, also epitomises it. See, among other works,
William Montgomery Watt, Early Islam: Collected Articles, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1990. In recent decades, discrete studies of early Shi’ism have
emerged in Western academia to provide a degree of corrective to these accounts,
some of which have also been concerned with constructing notions of Shi’i ortho-
doxy. For a survey of the literature, see Robert Gleave, ‘Recent Research into the
History of Early Shi’ism’, History Compass, 7, 6 (2009), pp. 1593–605. As Gleave
327
pp. [169–173] NOTES
observes, pointing to how a Shi’i perspective is still largely considered a fringe con-
cern in the teaching of Islamic Studies in the West, ‘To hire a Shi’i specialist to
teach Sunni Islam is, for some reason, more controversial than hiring a Sunni spe-
cialist to teach Shi’ism’; Gleave, ‘Recent Research’, p. 1602.
cle/2009/10/24/AR2009102402279_pf.html).
328
NOTES pp. [173–177]
12. Carool Kersten, Islam in Indonesia: The Contest for Society, Ideas and Values,
London, Hurst, 2015, p. 11.
13. DDII was established in the late 1960s by disgruntled former members of Masyumi
and other supporters of its former leader Mohammad Natsir, who also served as
its first chairman.
14. Hairus Salim HS and Muhammad Ridwan, Kultur Hibrida Anak Muda NU di
Jalur Kultural, Yogyakarta: LKiS, 1999.
15. Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, pp. 95–101.
16. Hasan Hanafi is a leading Egyptian philosopher, educated at the Sorbonne, where
he studied, among others, with Paul Ricoeur. Abdurrahman Wahid wrote a fore-
word to the Indonesian translation of Kazuo Shimogaki’s study of Hasan Hanafi’s
‘Islamic Left’: Kazuo Shimogaki, Kiri Islam Antara Modernisme dan Posmodernisme:
Telaah Kritis Pemikiran Hasan Hanafi, Yogyakarta: LKiS, 1993.
17. Kersten, Islam in Indonesia, p. 39.
18. Perhimpunan Pengembangan Pesantren dan Masyarakat, or ‘Society for Pesantren
and Community Development’.
19. The term ‘Islamic Post-Traditionalism’ was first used by one of the most promi-
nent members of the Anak Muda NU, Ahmad Baso, as the title for the Indonesian
translation of a collection of essays by al-Jabri; see Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabri, Post
Traditionalisme Islam, trans. and introduced by Ahmad Baso, Yogyakarta: LKiS,
2000.
20. Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2012, p. 5.
21. Imam al-Shafi’i (d.820) is considered the eponymous founder of the Shafi’i School,
one of four surviving authoritative schools of Sunni Islamic law; Al-Ash’arī (d.936)
and Al-Matūridī (d.944) were two leading religious scholars who were instrumen-
tal in defining orthodox Sunni theology, stripping it of much of the rationalist
philosophical elements introduced by the rivalling Mu’tazila School, who relied
heavily on Hellenic thinking. Al-Ghazālī (d.1111) is considered the most influ-
ential classical Muslim thinker who integrated theological, philosophical, legal
and mystical thinking.
22. Dabashi, World of Persian Literary Humanism, p. 8 (original emphasis).
23. Faisal Devji makes a compelling case for this in Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political
Idea, London: Hurst, 2013.
24. Dabashi, World of Persian Literary Humanism, pp. 12, 21; Hallaq, ‘Maqasid and
the Challenges of Modernity’, p. 2
25. Ahmad Baso, NU Studies: Pergolakan Pemikiran Antara Fundamentalisme Islam
dan Fundamentalisme Liberal, Jakarta: Erlangga, 2006, pp. 15, 29–30.
26. Rumadi, ‘Islam Liberal “Plus” = Post-Traditionalisme Islam’, Kompas, 23 November
329
pp. [177–184] NOTES
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. 9.
32. Baso, NU Studies, p. 159.
33. Ibid., p. 161.
34. Ibid., p. 164.
35. Ibid., p. 165
36. Ibid., p. 170.
37. Ibid., p. 172.
38. Ibid., p. 173, see also Muhammad Abid al-Jabri, Introduction to Arab-Islamic
Philosophy, Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas
in Austin, 1999, p. 120ff.; and Mohamed Abed al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights
and Law in Islamic Thought, London, I.B. Tauris, 2009.
39. Baso, NU Studies, p. 173. Ibn Hazm (d.1064) was a leading scholar in eleventh-
century Muslim Spain (Al-Andalus) and an advocate of Zahirism; a school favour-
ing the manifest meaning of the Qur’an and traditions of the Prophet. Al-Shāṭibī
(d.1388) was also a Andalusian religious scholar, who wrote the first systematic
work on the ‘higher objectives of law’.
40. Baso, NU Studies, p. 181.
41. Nur Khalik Ridwan, Pluralisme Borjuis: Kritik atas Nalar Pluralisme Cak Nur,
Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2002; Agama Borjuis: Kritik atas Nalar Islam Murni,
Yogyakarta: Ar-Ruzz, 2004.
42. Kazmi, ‘Limits of Muslim Liberalism’.
43. Ridwan, Pluralisme Borjuis, pp. 22–5, 28–9; Agama Borjuis, pp. 31, 188.
44. Ridwan, Pluralisme Borjuis, pp. 29–31; Agama Borjuis, pp. 40, 187, 279.
45. Ridwan, Pluralisme Borjuis, pp. 192–3; Agama Borjuis, pp. 29, 37.
46. Ridwan, Agama Borjuis, pp. 32–4.
47. Ibid., pp. 302ff.
48. Ibid., pp. 322–3, 373. PPP: Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (United Development
Party).
49. Ridwan Pluralisme Borjuis, pp. vi, xiv; Agama Borjuis, p. 33.
50. Ridwan, Pluralisme Borjuis, pp. 108–9.
51. Ridwan, Agama Borjuis, p. 34.
52. Ridwan, Pluralisme Borjuis, pp. 118–19, 237.
53. Ibid., pp. 339ff.
54. Ibid., p. 274.
55. Ibid., pp. 282, 284.
56. Ibid., p. 287.
57. Ibid., p. 293.
58. Ridwan, Agama Borjuis, p. 35.
59. Ridwan, Agama Borjuis, pp. 33–4
60. Ridwan, Pluralisme Borjuis, pp. 65ff.
330
NOTES pp. [184–190]
and Zulfan Barron (eds), Era Baru Gerakan Muhammadiyah, Malang: Universitas
Muhammadiyah Malang, 2008, pp. 195–9.
71. See Pradana Boy ZDF, ‘JIMM: Sebuah “Teks” Multitafsir’ and “Intelektual Sebagai
Agen Perubahan”’, in Boy ZTF a.o., Era Baru Gerakan Muhammadiyah, pp. 47–51
and 27–31 respectively.
72. Qodir, Pembaharuan Pemikiran Islam, p. 156.
73. Ibid., pp. 66, 102.
74. Ibid., p. 244.
75. Ibid., p. 232.
76. See Mohammed A. Bamyeh, ‘Anarchist Method, Liberal Intention, Authoritarian
nent/content/article/93-interviews/121728-iranians-rose-against-shah-to-
gain-freedom-justice-scholar (accessed 11 March 2015).
331
pp. [191–196] NOTES
4. See further Mansoor Moaddel, ‘Shi’i Political Discourse and Class Mobilization
in the Tobacco Movement of 1890–1892’, Sociological Forum, 7, 3 (September
1992), pp. 447–68.
5. For a recent exception, see Umar Ryad, ‘Anti-imperialism and the Pan-Islamic
Movement’, in David Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European Empires, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 131–49.
6. I have conceptualised the term ‘transversal’ and its meaning for resistance move-
ments more deeply in Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, On the Arab Revolts and the
Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
7. Mohammad-Hossein Jamshidi (ed.), Andishey-e siasiy-e imam Khomeini, Tehran:
Pajoheshkade-ye imam Khomeini va enghelab eslami, 1384 [2005], pp. 245, 246
(my translation).
8. See further Arshin Adib-Moghaddam (ed.), A Critical Introduction to Khomeini,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
9. Mehdi Bazargan, ‘Religion and Liberty’, in Charles Kurzman (ed.), Liberal Islam:
A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 77.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 79.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 81.
14. Ibid., p. 84.
15. Ayatollah Mahmud Taliqani, ‘The Characteristics of Islamic Economics’, in John
J. Donohue and John L. Esposito (eds), Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives,
21. Abdolkarim Soroush, ‘Sense and Nonsense: About the Cultural Revolution Again’,
available at http://www.drsoroush.com/English/By_DrSoroush/sense&nonsense.
html (accessed 11 February 2015).
22. Ibid.
23. Abdolkarim Soroush, ‘Islamic Revival and Reform: Theological Approaches’, in
Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri (eds), Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam:
Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, trans. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 33.
332
NOTES pp. [197–209]
333
pp. [209–222] NOTES
S. Lacroix (eds), Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic,
youtube.com/watch?v=BIfQLKqHleU&list=PLXk54e6gWMXXpE_QUeSl
5zu5u9988mb7j
12. Opening speech by H.R.H. Shaykh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, IISS Manama
13. This is not to deny the existence of complex codes of conduct, hierarchy or heri-
table privilege as well as multiple methods of generating legitimacy before the rise
of the Saudi or any contemporary Arabian nation state. Rather, it is to underscore
the fact that dynastic politics before the rise of such states were not conducted in
the name of absolute monarchy as a differentiated, full-fledged system of author-
ity in its own right.
14. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah
Palin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 4.
Laban and Regula B. Qureshi (eds), The Muslim Community in North America,
334
NOTES pp. [222–229]
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Zafar Ishaq Ansari, ‘Aspects of Black Muslim Theology’, Studia Islamica, 53 (1981),
pp. 137–76.
16. Ibid.
17. Zafar Ishaq Ansari, ‘Islam among African Americans: An Overview’, in Zahid
Hussain Bukhari et al. (eds), Muslims’ Place in the American Public Square: Hopes,
Fears, and Aspirations, Oxford: Altamira Press, 2004, pp. 222–67.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ali Mazrui, ‘Muslims between the Jewish Example and the Black Experience:
American Policy Implications’, in Bukhari et al., Muslims’ Place in the American
Public Square, pp. 117–44.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005, pp. 12–13.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., p. 5.
28. Ibid., pp. 31–2.
29. Ibid., p. 44.
30. Ibid., p. 43.
31. Ibid., p. 159.
32. Ibid., p. 6.
33. Ibid., p. 168.
34. Ibid., pp. 20–1.
35. Ibid., p. 111.
36. Amina Wadud, ‘American Muslim Identity: Race and Ethnicity in Progressive
Islam’, in Omid Safi (ed.), Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism,
Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2002, pp. 270–85.
37. Ibid.
38. Mitra Rastegar, ‘Managing “American Islam”’, International Feminist Journal of
Politics, 10, 4 (2008), pp. 455–74.
39. Ibid.
335
pp. [229–234] NOTES
40. Rosemary R. Corbett, Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the ‘Ground
Dialogue’, in Zahid Hussain Bukhari et al., Muslims’ Place in the American Public
Square, pp. 84–114.
49. Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, ‘Introduction’, in Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur (ed.), Living
Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Speak, Boston: Beacon Press, 2005, pp. 1–6.
50. Khalida Saed, ‘On the Edge of Belonging’, in Abdul-Ghafur, Living Islam Out
Loud, pp. 86–94.
51. Asma Gull Hasan, American Muslims: the New Generation, New York: Continuum,
2000, pp. 55–6.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Knight, Blue-Eyed Devil, p. 205.
59. Ani Zonneveld, ‘It’s Time for an American Islam!’, Aslan Media, 2012 (http://
www.aslanmedia.com/aslan-media-columns/ummah-wake-up/
item/234-it’s-time-for-an-american-islam).
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican, p. 20.
63. Ibid.
64. Richard Dwyer, ‘The Matter of Whiteness’, in Les Back and John Solomos (eds),
Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 539–48.
65. Zareena Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country, New Haven: Yale University Press,
2014, p. 165.
66. Ibid., pp. 307–8.
67. Jack O’Sullivan, ‘If You Hate the West, Emigrate to a Muslim Country’, The
Guardian, 8 October 2007 (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/08/
religion.uk).
336
NOTES pp. [235–245]
68. Ibid.
69. Dwyer, ‘Matter of Whiteness’, pp. 539–48.
70. Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country, pp. 159–60.
71. Mahdi Tourage, ‘Performing Belief and Reviving Islam: Prominent (White Male)
Converts in Muslim Revival Conventions’, Performing Islam, 1, 2 (2012),
207–26.
72. Hamza Yusuf, Facebook.com, 25 April 2014.
Russell Webb, a white American who converted to Islam in the late nineteenth
century. Abd-Allah carefully situates Webb within the dominant assumptions,
prejudices and intellectual currents popular within the ‘white culture’ of his time
and place. U.F. Abd-Allah, A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander
337
pp. [245–257] NOTES
his attitudes towards modernity and religion resonate with Eliot’s own. See
Chapters 3 and 4, Sadia Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial
Predicament, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
5. Saba Mahmood, ‘Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic
Reformation’, Public Culture, 18, 2 (2006), p. 346.
6. See, for instance, Mahmood’s critique of Stathis Gourgouris for drawing on a ‘lib-
eral romantic imaginary through which we are routinely asked to recognize our
most profound commitments’ in ‘Is Critique Secular? A Symposium at UC
Berkeley’, Public Culture, 20, 3 (2008), p. 447.
7. See Patrick Eisenlohr, ‘Na’t: Media Contexts and Transnational Dimensions of a
Devotional Practice’, in Barbara D. Metcalf (ed.), Islam in South Asia in Practice,
11. Muhammad Iqbal, ‘Qadianis and Orthodox Muslims’, in A.R. Tariq (ed.), Speeches
and Statements of Iqbal, Lahore: Gulam Ali & Sons, 1973, p. 92. On Iqbal and
the Ahmadis, see Chapter 3, Naveeda Khan, Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and
Skepticism in Pakistan, and Chapter 4 of Faisal Devji’s, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as
a Political Idea, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013 and Chapter 4
of At Freedom’s Limit.
12. Asiya Nasir, ‘Speech in Parliament following Shahbaz Bhatti’s Murder’, ‘Dedicated
to Shaheed Shahbaz Bhatti’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT4oGIWXfQ4
(accessed 26 August 2014).
13. Nasir, ‘Speech’.
14. On the importance of electronic dissemination of the na’t, see Eisenlohr, ‘Na’t:
Media Contexts and Transnational Dimensions of a Devotional Practice’.
15. See Chapter 4, At Freedom’s Limit.
16. See, for example, Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah.
17. Email correspondence with painter, 30 August 2014.
18. On F.N. Souza, see, for instance, Geeta Kapur, ‘Francis Newton Souza: Devil in
20. For a more detailed discussion of the term, see Chapters 5 and 6 in Sadia Abbas,
At Freedom’s Limit.
21. See Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, The Hudood Ordinances: A Divine Sanction?
A Research Study of the Hudood Ordinances and their Effect on the Disadvantaged
Sections of Pakistan Society, Lahore: Rhotas Books, 1990.
338
NOTES pp. [258–266]
23. Syed Akbar Hyder and Carla Petievich, ‘Qawwali Songs of Praise’, in Metcalf,
Islam in South Asia in Practice, and Esinlohr, ‘Na’t: Media Contexts and
Transnational Dimensions of a Devotional Practice’.
24. On devotional forms such as the marsiya and the nauha, see Syed Akbar Hyder’s
wonderful Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006, particularly Chapter 1.
25. See particularly the chapter ‘Lyrical Martyrdom’ in Reliving Karbala for a discus-
sion of the way the qawwali treats the martyrdom at Karbala.
26. Email correspondence with painter, 21 March 2014.
sense of the kind of authentic and unmediated response to his work he liked, Shafi
mentioned his carpenter who he then seemed to feel necessary to point out was
also ‘the cook’s son’.
F.D.R. to Bush, 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
8. Robert A. Hill, The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States, Boston:
339
pp. [267–273] NOTES
Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism’, Black Scholar, 24
(Winter 1994), pp. 23–46.
10. Clegg, An Original Man, pp. 70, 72–3, 82, 90–1, 172, 181, 182, 187, 283.
11. Penny von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,
1937–1957, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, p. 174.
12. Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Minister Louis Farrakhan and
the Final Call, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, pp. 72–6; Sean McCloud,
Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955–
1993, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, pp. 55–95.
13. This story is told in great detail in Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson:
Master of the Senate, New York: Knopf, 2002; Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson:
The Passage to Power, New York: Knopf, 2012.
14. Edward E. Curtis IV, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, pp. 18–22, 53–8; A.J. Toynbee,
Civilization on Trial, New York: Oxford University Press, 1948, p. 205; Edward
E. Curtis IV, ‘Islamism and Its African American Muslim Critics: Black Muslims
in the Era of the Arab Cold War’, American Quarterly, 59, 3 (2007), pp. 695–6.
21. Curtis, ‘Islamism and Its African American Muslim Critics’, pp. 683–709.
22. For an account that traces the remaking of American religions along conservative
and liberal political lines, see further Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of
American Religions: Society and Faith since World War II, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988.
23. Edward E. Curtis IV, ‘Islamizing the Black Body: Ritual and Power in Elijah
340
NOTES pp. [274–283]
28. The use of the law by the Nation of Islam is covered in Sarah Barringer Gordon,
The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 96–132.
29. See the pioneering account of Kathleen M. Moore, Al-Mughtaribun: American
Law and the Transformation of Muslim Life in the United States, Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 69–102.
30. Curtis, Black Muslim Religion, pp. 26–7, 106–7, 141–3.
31. Ibid., pp. 102–9.
32. Ibid., pp. 11–12.
33. Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization, Dubuque: Kendall/
Hunt, 1971; in ibid., pp. 86–93.
34. ‘Black Muslim’, New York Times, 28 February 1975, p. 32.
14.
POST-ISLAMISM AS NEOLIBERALISATION: NEW SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
1. In the case of Indonesia, the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS) occupies a position
on the spectrum of Islamist politics somewhere between a traditional Ikhwani ori-
entation and the ‘new Islamist’ approach represented by the AKP in Turkey.
2. See Vali Nasr, ‘The Rise of “Muslim Democracy”’, Journal of Democracy, 16 (2005),
pp. 13–27; Ray Baker, Islam without Feat: Egypt and the New Islamists, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003; and Augustus Richard Norton, ‘Thwarted
Politics: The Case of Egypt’s Hizb al-Wasat’, in Robert Hefner (ed.), Remaking
Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005, pp. 133–61.
3. Jillian Schwedler, Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
4. Carrie Wickham, ‘The Causes and Dynamics of Islamist Auto-Reform’, ICIS
International, 6 (2006), pp. 1–3.
5. John R. Bradley, ‘Cairo’s Failing Fundamentalists’, Prospect, 147 (2008).
6. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety. The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
7. Quintan Wiktorowicz, ‘The Salafi Movement: Violence and Fragmentation of
Community’, in Miriam Cooke and Bruce Lawrence (eds), Muslim Networks from
Hajj to Hip Hop, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
8. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among
Western Publics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
341
pp. [283–288] NOTES
9. My omission of militants from this ‘portfolio’ of contemporary Islamism should
not be taken to imply that I discount the continued relevance of violent extrem-
ism in the name of Islam. Indeed, according to recent interviews conducted by
Fawaz Gerges, there has been a marked upsurge in support for and interest on the
part of young men in North Africa to serve as volunteer fighters in Iraq: ‘If there
were not so much attention being paid to border crossings these days, the flow of
Arab fighters to Iraq would be much greater than the number who went to
Afghanistan in the 1980s.’ Gerges notes that this phenomenon is not a by-prod-
uct of the classic model of urban, professional Islamism but rather that it corre-
lates strongly with socioeconomic disaffection in the urban slums of large cities
(personal conversation, June 2008).
10. Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
11. Charles Hirschkind, ‘What Is Political Islam?’, Middle East Report, 27, 4 (1997),
pp. 12–14.
12. Ibid., p. 14. Note that he is not rejecting the idea of a relationship between socio-
economic status and Islamic social activism, only the notion that the totality of
the latter can be comprehended through the former.
13. See Asef Bayat, ‘Islamism and Social Movement Theory’, Third World Quarterly,
26, 6 (2005), pp. 891–908. Sara Lei Sparre and Marie Juul Petersen, ‘Youth and
Social Change in Jordan and Egypt’, ISIM Review, 20 (2007), pp. 14–15.
14. Hirschkind, ‘What Is Political Islam?’
15. Bayat, ‘Islamism and Social Movement Theory’, p. 899.
16. Ibid., p. 898.
17. Ibid.
18. Steven M. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford
342
NOTES pp. [288–297]
343
INDEX
345
INDEX
346
INDEX
347
INDEX
348
INDEX
349
INDEX
350
INDEX
351
INDEX
352
INDEX
353
INDEX
354
INDEX
355
INDEX
Malaysia, 7, 153, 160, 234, 281 division of public and private, 68, 70
Malcolm X, 227, 265, 269, 272, 275, ego, 122
279, 280 freedom, 31–42
al-Maliki, Nouri, 162 heaven and hell, 110–11
Maliki school, 151 law of the universe, 113
de Man, Paul, 55 liberalism, 106
manqabat, 259 MI6, 192
March on Washington Movement, 266 Michaels, Walter Benn, 102
Mardin fatwa, 162 Middle Periods, 138, 140, 147
Maritain, Jacques, 115 middle way, 150–63
Marshall, Thurgood, 265, 267, 268 Midsummer’s Night Dream (Shake-
marsiya, 259, 260 speare), 236
Marx and the End of Orientalism milad, 250, 261
(Turner), 127 Mill, John Stuart, 2, 52
Marx, Karl, 50, 112, 123, 185 Minhaj-ul-Qur’an, 159
Marxism, 69, 116, 168, 179, 181, 186 minority persecution, 149–50,
Mas’udi, Masdar F., 175, 177 159–60, 161
Masoud, Moez, 292 miraj, 80
Masroor, Ajmal, 155 mirrors, 62
Masuzawa, Tomoko, 131, 134 Mitchell, Timothy, 41, 93–4, 97
Masyumi (Majelis Syuro Muslimin moderate Islam, 8, 9, 11–12, 150
Indonesia), 169, 170, 182, 184 Egypt, colonial, 18, 20, 22–7
material v. spiritual, 68–9, 83 al-wasatiyyah, 150–63
Matringe, Denis, 124 Modern Egypt (Cromer), 36
Maturidites, 153, 175 modernisation theory, 3, 125–6, 137
Maudoodi, Syed Abul Ala, 6, 8, 248 modernity, 47–64, 94, 125–48
Mauss, Marcel, 131 civil religion, 135–6
Mayr, Ernst, 113 Enlightenment values, 96
Mazhab Ciputat, 174 in Indonesia, 167–87
Mazrui, Ali A., 225–6, 231 neo-modernism, 168, 171, 174,
McCallum, Leo, 275 177–80, 182, 186
Mecca, 209, 225, 276 neo-Weberian, 126–7
Medina, 225 Western monopoly on, 130, 131,
Mehta, Uday, 21–2, 42 137
Melians, 96 Modood, Tariq, 244, 260
Melucci, Alberto, 286–, 288, 297 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran,
meraj, 259 192
‘Meri Janib bhi ho ek nigah-e-karam’, Mohtashamipur, Ali Akbar, 103
247 Monism, 81
Metaphysical Poets, The’ (Eliot), 245 Montesquieu, 36–7
metaphysics Mormonism, 291
356
INDEX
357
INDEX
358
INDEX
359
INDEX
Rais, Amien, 170, 171, 172 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 25, 34,
Rajasthan, 252 191, 266
‘Ram’ (Iqbal), 79
Rama, 77, 80 Sadat, Anwar, 279
Ramadan, Said, 271 Sadiq, Muhammad, 271
Ramadan, Tariq, 8, 135, 152 Saed, Khalida, 232
Ramanuja, 80, 81 Safavid Empire (1501–1736), 142,
Ramayana, 80 146, 156
Randolph, Asa Philip, 266 Safi, Omid, 8
Ranjha, 258 Sahabi, Yadollah, 193
Rastegar, Mitra, 230 Sahlins, Marshall, 116
rationality, 12 Said, Edward, 29, 34, 95, 97, 101, 127,
re-Islamisation, 126, 288 137
Reconstruction of Religious Thought in saisir, 120
Islam, The (Iqbal), 70, 121, 124 Salafism, 103, 141, 150–57, 162, 179,
redemptive associations, 133 203, 209–17, 221, 233
Reformation, 3, 33, 142 iconoclasm, 259
jihadism, 150, 151, 156, 162, 203,
religion, definition of, 2
209–17
Renaissance, 3
and legal schools, 151
Renan, Ernest, 72–3, 133
salat, 278
Republican Party (US), 226, 232
Salman, crown prince of Bahrain,
Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 192
215–16
Rida, Rashid, 8
Salvatore, Armando, 286
Ridwan, Nur Khalid, 181–4
Samkara, 81
Robin, Corey, 217
Sands of Time, 205
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 49, 57 sans historicism, 175
Rockefeller Foundation, 94 Sanskrit, 79, 81
Roe v. Wade (1973), 271 al-Sāq ‘ala al-sāq (al-Shidyāq), 56
Romanticism, 130, 244, 245–6 Sarmad, 258, 259
Rome, ancient, 32, 257 Sartori, Andrew, 49
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 205 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 199
Roots (Haley), 277 Sasanian Empire (224–651), 139
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 33, 37, 131 Sasono, Adi, 186
Roy, Olivier, 282–3, 286, 288 Sassi, 258
Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 7, 244
154 satisfaction of needs, 56–8, 62, 64
rule of law, 58, 215 Saturday Evening Post, 267
Rumadi, Ahmad, 176–8, 180 Saudi Arabia, 101, 103, 160, 203–18,
Rumi, 199 264
Rumi’s Onion (Shafi), 260 al-Sayyid, Ahmad Lutfi, 17, 19, 20, 23,
Rushdie, Salman, 7, 244 25, 32, 34–44
360
INDEX
361
INDEX
362
INDEX
Triumph the Church of the New Age, Iran, relations with, 191, 192
266 Israel, relations with, 94
‘true’ Islam, 11–13, 98–101, 141, 150, Muslim immigration, 7, 159, 245
173, 176, 180, 220, 226, 229–34 Qur’an documentary, 155
Trump, Donald, 240 Radical Middle Way, 160
Tum Ek Gorakh Dhanda Ho, 258 Saudi Arabia, relations with, 208
Tunisia, 281, 282 al-wasatiyyah, 152–6, 160
turāthiyyūn, 172, 175 United Nations, 3, 95, 126
Turkey, 5, 7, 25, 103, 149, 281–82, United States
283, 290, 296 Afghanistan War (2001–14), 7, 204,
Turkish Caliphate, see Ottoman 229
Empire African Americans, 219, 220, 222–8,
Turner, Bryan, 126–7, 140 236, 238, 263–80
Twelver Shi‘ism, 151, 156 American Exceptionalism, 229, 233
Two Souzas, The (Shafi), 250–51, 251, American Islam, 219–40
261 area studies, 93–5
Bush administration (2001–9), 229,
U.S. News and World Report, 267
230
Über den Humanismus (Heidegger),
Chinese boycott (1905–6), 25
108
civil religion, 135–6
Ultimate Ego, 110, 111, 112, 116,
Clay v. United States (1971), 274
118–21, 122, 124
Deen Intensive Foundation, 160
ulū’l-bāb, 186
Gulf War (1990–91), 278
‘Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘a, 40
Indonesia, relations with, 169, 173
Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), 138,
Iran, relations with, 95, 192
151
Iraq War (2003–11), 7, 96, 204, 213
Umm-e-Habiba, 247, 261
umma, 26, 51, 135, 146, 148, 158, 220, Israel, relations with, 94–5
221, 222, 230, 237 Jim Crow laws, 267
ummat al-wasatiyyah, 152 Nation of Islam, 14, 223, 227, 229,
unadulterated’ Islam, see ‘true’ Islam 263–80
Understanding the Four Madhabs Obama administration (2009–17),
(Winter), 155 173, 230, 240
Unheimlichkeit, 49 Pilgrim Fathers, 222
United Arab Emirates (UAE), 7, 103 post-humanism, 118
United Arab Republic (1958–61), 265 Saudi Arabia, relations with, 205
United Kingdom September 11 attacks (2001), 8, 135,
Anglicanism, 37 150, 152, 153, 155, 160, 172, 209,
Egypt, colonial (1882–1953), 229, 235
19–45 slavery, 34
Indian Raj (1858–1947), 2, 4, 6, 25, State Department, 232
65–88 Trump administration (2017–), 240
363
INDEX
Vietnam War (1964–73), 267, 268, Wahid, Abdurrahman, 172, 174, 176,
273–4 177, 179, 180, 186, 187
War on Terror, 5, 172, 215 Wahid Bey, 23, 24
al-wasatiyyah, 152, 160–61 Wahid Institute, 176
Watergate scandal (1972–4), 279 Wallace, Mike, 269
women’s rights, 28 waqf, 145
‘universalisation’ of knowledge, 97 War on Terror, 5, 172, 215
universalism, 2–3, 43, 49, 50, 51, 60, al-wasatiyyah, 150–63
77–8, 82, 86 Wasatiyyah Institute Malaysia, 153,
university discourse, 54–5 160
University of California, Los Angeles Washbrook, David, 98
(UCLA), 92 Washington, Booker T., 276
University of Chicago, 170, 171, 179, Watergate scandal (1972–4), 279
181 Weber and Islam (Turner), 126
University of Durham, 95 Weber, Max, 126–7, 130, 131, 139,
University of Regensburg, 149 143, 144, 147, 185, 186
University of Tehran, 196 Wertheim, Willem Frederik, 182
Until They Change Themselves, 291
Westphalian state, 125, 128, 141–6
Untouchables, 65
‘What Is Political Islam?’ (Hirschkind),
‘Urabi, Ahmed, 22–3
284–5
Urdu, 79, 83, 88, 247
What’s Right with Islam (Abdul Rauf ),
usūl al-fiqh, 175
229
Uyun al-hikmah (Ibn Sina), 201
Whiting H and G, 276
Why I Am a Muslim (Hasan), 232
Van Ess, Josef, 103
Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky, 282
Vatikiotis, Panayiotis Jerasimof, 29
Vattimo, Gianni, 108–9 Wikileaks, 95
Vedanta, 81, 82, 111 Wilkins, Roy, 268
veiling, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 229, 240, will, 85–7, 118
291 Williams, Chancellor, 277
velayat-e faqih, 194 Williams, Pharrell, 156
Vietnam War (1964–73), 267, 268, Winter, Timothy, 152–6, 161, 162
273–4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 185
Vishvamitra, 80 women, 5, 22, 27–31, 190, 271–72,
Vivekananda, Swami, 134 273
Voll, John, 178 abortion, 271
Voltaire, 33 birth control, 273
Von Eschen, Penny, 267 education, 29, 30
feminism, 17, 18, 30, 190, 272
Wadud, Amina, 228, 239 segregation, 27, 42
Wahhabism, 151, 155, 156, 157, 171, United States, 28, 231, 234, 271–72,
179, 180, 204–18, 248, 259 273
364
INDEX
365